Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (56 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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While the mistress of the story,
la Señora de la historia
, and the reporter conversed thus and gazed down from their rocky platform above the brush at the settlement in the hollow, twilight fell and the moment of departure drew near: for her last crossing of the Sierra de Gredos she had chosen this night, a clear one, to be sure, but one without moonlight, a new-moon night.
The granite outcroppings stretching as far as the eye could see—the normal unit of space in the Sierra—shimmered yellow-red-blue, almost sparkling, as if it were early morning, shortly before sunrise.
In Hondareda not a light was burning. From the giant hollow in which the town lay, its houses indistinguishable at the moment from the glacial chaos of boulders, a shot or explosion rang out—in fact, it was merely a heavy piece of firewood crashing from its pile onto the rocky ground, the bang amplified as it echoed through the mountain basin.
From innumerable chimneys the smoke from stoves and workshops had been rising, steadily and everywhere straight up in a column, and now, in the interval it took to close one's eyes and open them again, the smoke seemed here and there to have suddenly ceased.
How shrunken the capital of the Sierra appeared. And what an indecipherable and bizarre pattern it continued to present. High up in the sky the sun was still shining, its rays visible in the jet contrails of a plane that was already out of sight, the trail ending abruptly, as if the plane had crashed or been shot down. In the shadow of the summit plain, the wheeling of a kite, above that the wheeling of a mountain eagle, still in the sun. The settlers appeared, seemingly in their best clothes, to bid her farewell, dressed as if for their last days on earth.
Now above the entire region, from this clear sky, came a rain of pamphlets, with the sound of falling leaves, and one of them also landed at their feet. They did not have to bend down to read it. Written in all the languages of the world was one sentence in bold type: “People of Hondareda! We have not forgotten you!” And that was not meant to be reassuring; that was a threat.
From the corner of her eye she saw what she had not noticed before—that the observer, Jakob Lebel, had swollen and reddened eyelids, and that he was wringing his hands, like a woman or a very old man.
The rattle of tank treads that reached them from the depression came from suitcase wheels: a few people were leaving the settlement with bag and baggage, dragging themselves along the newly rebuilt road up to the Puerto de Candeleda. And the rattling also came from the Venetian blinds being lowered in some windows, something that had previously not been customary anywhere in Hondareda in the evening (they were used otherwise only to keep out the sun).
On the other hand, she saw the shutters open, providing a framed image, as if brought close by a telescope, on the only residential building that during her entire time here had been locked up, as if permanently abandoned, and the iron pegs, which otherwise hung down on chains, were stuck into the sockets along the entire façade to fasten the wide-open shutters; and this one stone building, now that it was apparently inhabited at last, allowed them—simply because it was lived in?—to hear the beat of music (a kind that had never, and would never have, been heard in Hondareda otherwise, a music seemingly vanished and unknown).
And in this “blockhouse” the first light appeared, and there was singing, no, not there, somewhere. And no, it was not singing, merely humming. “If you're going to sing, then sing so we can hear you!” Who said that? She and the man next to her shouted it in unison. And at this command someone, who? promptly sang, at top volume, the single line of a song that was immediately swallowed up by the increasing late-afternoon racket and the rumbling of the garbage trucks (a song which later, as the apocryphal storyteller, who chimed in again, reducing the story to a legend, would have it, was “supposed to become the anthem of the vanished region”). And this single line, audible through the din, went, “I know who you are!” and, unlike the sentence in the leaflet, this was an expression of trust and respect.
And the rumbling also came from the other members of the observation
team, which included as many women as men, who were just running their final laps of the day around the settlement, eight to thirteen of them, shouting and at the same time exchanging incomprehensible small talk, while the rotors of the helicopter that was to bring them back to their lodgings on the other side of the Sierra ridge were already whirring (and another line of the song, not added until later, referred, according to the apocryphal narrator, to these runners in circles: “I do not know who you are!”).
Yet these runners from elsewhere were the only ones whose faces—primarily the nose and chin—became visible. A kind of artificial light lit them up, as if they were running for a movie. Their running kicked up dust, even when there was nothing on the bare rock to form dust. And compared to the incessant, loud slobber of words emanating from their mouths as they ran, the slobber of any animal would seem like a string of pearls. The population of Hondareda, or what remained of it, appeared on its pre-twilight
corso,
which resembled more a back-and-forth of individual residents, as mere outlines.
Although each of them had just stepped out of the nearby cave where he lived, the silhouettes there seemed to come from afar. And at the sight of the troop of runners they walked even more casually (“with provocative slowness,” as another observer's report put it). As is customary everywhere, dogs accompanied them, of whom the false author then wrote that in H. they barked “as dogs nowhere else do, with sounds as strained, feeble, and soft as the voices of the people there.” And along with the Hondarederos strolled the local mountain goats, pack mules, a couple of pigs, and, “as legend has it,” even the silhouettes of some Sierra hedgehogs.
It was no invention, however, that, as she then told the rightful author, those strolling through the town were joined time and again by children who had already been put to bed and now came out of the houses and asked their foster or grandparents: “Did you call me?” And not a few of these children had gray hair, as she now saw upon taking leave of Hondareda. And the pairs of grandparents or foster parents all looked like twins who had grown old. And the young couples who stood in silence with their arms around each other, from the beginning to the end of the alleys and squares, were again the same from chaos boulder to chaos boulder, the first couple. Yes, there she had been among people she could understand.
And one of the settlers—wasn't it the town elder—had departed not on foot but by way of the freight cable car, without luggage, alone in the
open gondola, from which only his head protruded. And one of the neighbors had secretly fertilized the plants in the greenhouse for another in his absence. And the signal earlier, marking the end of the workday in the glacial basin, had been like a temple gong, church bells, a minaret call, a shofar, a siren, a ship's horn, a train's whistle, and a school bell all at once. Finally a silence that rose from down there, a mighty and, to both their ears, precious and exquisite silence. What did the Hondarederos call themselves in private?
Indios?
—The name for people who had once emigrated and in some fashion or other become rich.
Now he, the observer, was the one who gazed sidelong at the woman next to him on the rocky outcropping. And she let him see her. No woman had ever let herself be seen by him this way. (The author, in his village in La Mancha, later suggested that at this point in the story the Spanish expression
se dejó ver
, “let oneself be seen,” be inserted.)
He had never encountered a female adventurer like this. There was also one woman or another on his observer team who called herself, officially, and listed as her profession on her passport, or for her regular appearances on television, “adventurer,”
“aventurière,” “aventurera,”
and had in fact crossed the Gobi Desert alone, swum the Channel, sailed across the Pacific, climbed the north face of Mount Eiger and a year later the south face of the Karakorum range, thinking, all the while, according to her published diaries, of her one to three children back home, whom her husband was taking care of, proud of his wife the adventurer.
But this adventurer here, even if she had an absent child like the others, belonged to another species, never before observed, let alone back home in the media. Jakob Lebel, or whatever his name was (certainly not Cox—that did not suit him), felt his heart pounding. While the woman let herself be seen by him, she looked at him.
He had never confronted such eyes before. Her gaze pierced him through and through. It was an open and disarmingly friendly gaze. (This rocky mound in the wilderness of broom had something special about it.) But there was another element at work in the gaze of the adventurer: and that was an almost boundless neediness and a delicacy of feeling of the same sort, and what seemed strangest to him was that it immediately became clear that her gaze did not apply to him, not to him, and it was quite sufficient for him that she let herself be seen by him.
Adventurer: that meant here that in her presence, in the presence of this stranger, he, the observer, was seized with the spirit of adventure, yes,
spirit, and yes, seized. It would never have occurred to him that this creature, as straightforward as she was proud, as loving as she was in need of love, was a former film star or a current or former queen of the financial world—although such information would have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the moment: after all, nowadays it had become almost routine for people to shed their so-called professional roles from one moment to the next and, not perform other roles or leisure activities, but rather not perform at all anymore and simply become unrecognizable, unrecognizable and transparent in a lovely way, just letting themselves be seen without one's having to think “doctor,” “architect,” “entrepreneur,” “artist,” only not as she was doing now, in which connection another factor was that the person offering and revealing herself so freely was a woman, and what a woman—one who, among other things, never felt cold, even her hair exuding warmth.
Jakob Lebel returned her gaze. Ah, to embrace her on the spot. But hadn't that already happened, when she let herself be seen this way and he saw her this way? And her hand, which she held in front of her, bent upward, not cramped but loose, like a bowl, showing there, too, neediness. Ah, to take this hand. But hadn't that already happened? That her hand let itself be seen this way was sufficient for him.
The light, too, the last of the day, added to the effect, a glow, the “alpenglow”? no, the Sierra glow, the glowing of the Sierra de Gredos, of the granite peaks far to the south—what kind of glow? go there and see for yourself.
“I must go,” the adventurer said with that smile she had smiled every time she used the word “must.” He debated for a moment whether he should give her his copy of the “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos” as a parting gift, but it was obvious that she did not want any advice for the journey.
He, too, had to go (without a smile, even inwardly). On this night he would not, this once at least, board the helicopter, but would stay in Hondareda, would stride decisively over someone's threshold, going from one connector to another into the house proper. A wind arose, a wind from the south, a mild one, and the German word for gust,
Windsbraut
, bride of the wind, occurred spontaneously to Jakob Lebel as the two of them parted and he turned once more to watch her as she began to climb. How glad he would have been to go with her, as her page, her
escudero
.
The dew had already fallen and collected in a rocky basin, forming a little pool, and he moistened his temples with it. He had always been at
the head of his class, in elementary school, then in high school and at the university, and now also on his team, yet he had never found his place, and would never find it?
And what was she doing and thinking in the meantime, the woman? Now, very close, a stone's throw, from the Sierra ridge, she jingled something in her pockets, but it was not coins but hazelnuts, chestnuts, juniper berries, and who knows what else. And if she was thinking anything, perhaps it was something along the lines of the words to be found in the orchardist's text that her brother had used during his training at vocational school, on the variety of apple called “Jakob Lebel”: “On its sun-facing side, Jakob Lebel is checkered and spotted … in the cellar its skin becomes waxy … slightly sour taste, without aroma … bears even at high, cold elevations … naturally lacks a straight habit of growth and must therefore be pruned frequently … . Back in the day when I was a fruit thief, the apples known as Jakob Lebel were my favorites. Jakob Lebel, you are not yet sufficiently lost …”
The last mountain crickets chirped, up above and down below. And upon hearing them, Jakob Lebel recalled that, after all, there was a kind of plan for the day in Hondareda, repeated time and again, and it went: “Go out and listen to the crickets!” And he wished that the crickets, with their incredibly tender voices, might perform for his burial here. Did he want to die, then, here in Hondareda? Yes. But first he wanted to live here.
“Jakob Lebel”? That simply could
not
be the name of an enemy.
No doubt she, too, looked back at the hummock on which she had been standing only a short while ago, and at Hondareda, or Hondoneda, down below. Sometimes, when one stepped out of a house or a pub onto the street and looked in through a window at the place one had just left, didn't one feel surprised at no longer seeing oneself inside, sitting at the table or wherever one had been a few seconds earlier, reading, writing, talking to someone, and might that not give rise to a hallucination—of oneself?
This is what the woman experienced as she set out and glanced over her shoulder at the now vacant rocky mound, and this is how she later described it to the author. The hallucination, the residual image, of herself was so compelling that her astonishment was accompanied by shock. She recoiled at the flickering silhouette there, as if that “Me!” were something sinister, or rather something that made one shudder, not the way one would shudder at a ghost or some other alarming phantom, a menacing one: Didn't this recoiling, followed by pausing and doing a double take, also make one stronger? (Like her brother, she was both brave and easily startled, and there was the family legend that this propensity for being startled went back to that night when they were still children and someone came dashing into the house with the news that their parents and their other brother had died in an accident.)
And Hondareda in the glacial trough? As she looked down, it seemed at first not even to exist anymore, and for this verb “to seem,” according to the author in La Mancha, the Spanish term
traslucir,
or “shine through,” would probably have been wrong: for all that showed of the Dark Clearing was the darkness, a black hole in the middle of the otherwise brightly dusky high Sierra.
But then the labyrinthine settlement appeared all the more distinct in the darkness, with a more intense glittering of the mica, a glowing of the veins of quartz, a shimmering of the lichen: the latter, coating the cliffs as well as the rocky roofs throughout the basin with a yellowish-greenish-grayish film, made the town look like a city of millions, like Shanghai or São Paulo, photographed from a satellite halfway between the earth and the moon.
But to the same backward glance how small our Hondareda looked, and then, as she walked backward, how it gradually shrank still more. And at the same time a roar rose from the former ice basin, a roar such as might have come from a normally quiet area that was flooded in all directions as far as the horizon, the roar coming from the bottom of a river, still coursing along its channel even as it spilled over its banks, “the roar of the Mississippi.” And in the roar one could also make out a kind of buzzing, which brought to mind the many newly installed apiaries on those slopes that were bathed in sunshine at almost all times of day—nowhere was the sun warmer and more constant than up here in the mountains—the apiaries also serving some of the settlers as dwellings, which one of her hosts took as a pretext for renaming Hondareda “El Nuevo Colmenar,” which translated approximately as “New Beehive” (a reversal of a name very common on the Iberian highland, “El Viejo Colmenar,” “Old Beehive”). And from this evening-warm incessant buzzing a single voice emerged, that of a child, not crying but shouting, rising unmistakably above all the underlying sounds: “Warte auf mich! Wait for me! Attends-moi! Es-pérame!” Now at nightfall the mighty rushing sound of the bees, and many bright, piercing tones.
Finally, when she was already an arrow-shot away from the ridge of the Sierra and the crossing point—off to one side of the Candeleda Pass—to the steep drop of the massif to the south, and the settlement behind her already out of cannon- and mortar-fire range, if not of rocket range, she could make out down below distant silhouettes, which, as they strolled alone along the only remaining bright feature of the landscape, the lake, the sky-mirroring laguna, were constantly ducking for no apparent reason, and in the trackless mountain steppe, before they crossed from one granite mound to another, whipped their dim profiles around, as if they were about to cross a dangerous boulevard with vehicles whizzing by.
And in the end she could no longer see any clear image of Hondareda or Hondoneda (the most recent maps mention the place only in
parentheses, if at all), and instead, to the accompaniment of her steps crunching in the stones and scree, with stretches of quartz sand and snow in between, a litany consisting only of place names came to her: Nuevo Colmenar, Deep Enclosure, Dark Clearing, El Barco de la Sierra, Fondamente Nuove, New Briar Hole, Wandering Dune, High Lowland—just as the mountains of the summit plain, now at eye level, became transformed into pure names, and more and more were added to Galana (The Elegant One), Hermanitos (Little Brothers), Mira (= Look!), Morezón (from Moro: Moor, Arab?), Almanzor. Liturgy of preservation! It had been a long time since she had attended mass. “Attended”? Yes, attended. Yet there was hardly anything that completed one more than being present for the holy liturgy. Liturgy: oh, my goodness.
So had she left no farewell present for the transitory people of Hondareda, whom she had once spoken of as “mine”? Nothing—nothing at all. She had even taken something away from them—pilfered something (see “fruit thief”). While she was making the rounds in the plantation there as a guest, and told one of her hosts about her early days as a fruit thief back in the village, he replied that for him, too, now soon to be an old man, climbing into a tree still meant a good beginning to a day or a happy day. She, “friend of thieves and lost souls”? A thief and lost soul herself?
In the course of time each of the immigrants in Hondareda had shared his story with her. The main point, for each, was his reasons for being here, but then came a whole slew of events that had nothing to do with that. The more the individual got into the swing of his narrative, the more the elements of the story became jumbled, which did not mean that his story was confused. It seemed rather to have taken place so long ago that now it was true again. What became clear, even without reasons: the way he or she had left a familiar region, homeland, state, confederation, etc., and that he or she would remain here now—where else?—though not necessarily forever.
Some of them invented their reasons, for the most part obviously flimsy ones—“I was running away from today's women!”—“I wanted to escape the male world!”—“I did not want to die a rich man!”—so as to hint that in reality they had had entirely different reasons, or none at all, or that the reasons were not all that important to their story.
What gave an impetus to the speaking as well as the listening each time was first the sharing of a meal between the two of them (even days
and months afterward, when she was already somewhere else entirely, she had an aftertaste, all the more fresh, of those Hondareda meals in her mouth), and then also the fact that the new settlers' individual dwellings, despite their markedly private nature, all had the feel of a public or generally accessible space—not in the sense of gathering places, public offices, community halls, or churches, but of alehouses or dives, albeit without the ill repute; divelike simply because the dining table was always set up in the innermost recesses of the inhabited cave, and could have accommodated, in addition to the two of them and perhaps a child doing homework at the other end, various total strangers, who also seemed to be expected. To sit deep inside these caves with the aura of dives sharpened one's attention and helped one collect oneself (was this expression still current?).
Thus one day, or one evening, she heard from a settler to whose table—at other times a workbench and various other things—she was invited, that he had left the land of his origin “out of sheer boredom. It was not my country in particular that bored me. Nor was it the climate. Or my work. It was sheer boredom, total and all-encompassing.
“True, even as a child and then, in a different way, as a youth, I was sometimes bored. But only sometimes, in certain places, in conjunction with certain activities, and primarily when I had no one or nothing to play with, and in my adolescence when I was terribly alone. Except that this kind of boredom became increasingly tolerable as I got older, for I imagined that later on, in my profession, I would no longer be alone, and that in love, or what I imagined love would be like, everything would be different.
“And what I imagined did not deceive me. From a time that cannot be pinpointed, once love arrived? once hate arose? once I found pleasure in action and inaction, also in taking care of things, in acting and thinking in concert with others, also in mere watching, I was no longer bored. At last I felt alive, one way or the other, even in sorrow and rage, and always, and in the thick of things—never lacking for excitement.
“And I imagined that from this moment on I would continue to be like those I had once envied, those who seemed to be basking in a realm inaccessible to me, who said of themselves: Bored? I have no idea what that means!
“My imagination turned out to have tricked me after all. In another period—known as the transition, right?—which cannot be pinpointed or dated, boredom returned, neither from one moment to the next nor from
one day or year to the next. It did not come over me all of a sudden, but sneaked up on me—certain clichés, only a few, can hit the nail on the head, if not used too often—interposing itself between me and events, persons, things, places.
“First, I do not know when, one thing bored me, then several things, then everything. And even then I did not know that it was boredom—initially I felt only slight discomfort, which in the end became huge. For, truth be told, this was not a recurrence of the boredom familiar to me from my childhood and youth, an appropriate, healthy, or at least not unhealthy boredom, but rather a sickness, something without a name, and calling it ‘boredom' or ‘nameless' was merely an expression of my confusion and helplessness. Sickness and madness. It became a boredom as hopeless as it was deadly: on the one hand, I was hopelessly sick with it, and on the other hand, I was driven in my insane boredom to exterminate and destroy. ‘You bore me' meant the same thing as: ‘
My child
bores me,' as: ‘
My house
bores me,' as: ‘
The forest
bores me,' and also, yes, ‘
I
bore myself '—and it meant a compulsion to do away with you, my child, the forest, and myself.
“And so I had to get out, to come here. And at least here I am rid of that kind of boredom. And by now I even imagine that I am on my way to a third kind of boredom here, one in which, just as before, time will seem to stretch, but in an entirely different way. This morning I walked across a snowfield and kept sinking in with my left leg, never with my right. In front of me in the snow, I swear to God, a snake was crawling along, and then a giant dragonfly with a yellow head was swooping over the ice floes in the lake.”
Another person whose hospitality she enjoyed for a while said that he had originally come to the region to do glacier research—his specialty: the hollows left by the melted glacial masses, together with their microclimate, vegetation, and so forth—and then he had decided on the spur of the moment to stay here, to continue his research and simply to stay.
The next person who took her in presented himself to her as someone who, in his place of origin, had been obsessed with searching—searching for treasures, as well as for this little thing or that—with searching in general, and in Hondareda, where there was nothing to search for, and all the treasures, if there had been any to discover there, had already been extracted, he finally felt free of his compulsion, especially of his narrow, and narrowing, searcher's gaze, and free, for what? For now, simply free.
Others among the founders told her their stories: of being descended from a tribe of missionaries, involved for centuries in converting everything they came across, anywhere in the world, and of having put this tribe and its missionary zeal behind them once they set out for or returned here; or: having become, in their distant country of origin, in the course of life as petty-minded as their neighbors, in fact several degrees more crotchety, more narrow-minded, more malicious—more mean and nasty, lying in wait for some misfortune to strike next door, an accident, a separation, a death—one simply had to escape from an environment that turned one into a person like that!; or they told of inheriting from their ancestors, handed down from generation to generation, over there in Peru, Arizona, Ecuador, Honduras (!), the sense that the mere mention of the Sierra de Gredos and of Hondareda was the magic word at the right moment, “like a lit match”; or having been inspired to come here simply by the names, or by the sound of one name or another along the way, the sound of “El Almanzor,” “El Puerto de Candeleda,” “río Tormes,” “río Bar-bellido,” “La Galana,” “La Angostura,” “Ramacastañas.”
One of them explained to her, and he was perfectly serious, that he had come to Hondareda from Tokyo, or was it Honolulu? or Cairo? and then settled there because he wanted to feel that he was “finally in a hub” again, in a place and a region “where something mattered,” “where something could be seen happening”—what could be seen?—no answer—but then she had not asked, either.
And then another in his dinner-table monologue (she always had the impression that the entire colony of settlers was sitting at the table with the two of them): here in the trough in the high Sierra he had begun to dream again; the closed-off or remote nature of the region produced (yes) particularly cosmopolitan dreams, also—expansive dreams, in which he himself participated only as part of an audience—“but how I participate! More involved than I ever was in my time as a protagonist!”—epic dreams, whose vividness stayed with him when he woke up, and represented “capital” for the day, for being and acting awake, value (it took no special talent to guess that the speaker here was her former co-director at the world or central bank, or whatever it was called or may have been called—who seemed, by the way, to have forgotten his partner, or at least acted as though he had).

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