Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (61 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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While she was still pulling herself together, she had uttered a cry, no, a rattle, a stammer, consisting only of consonants. And now a barking, hoarse and grating, issued from the beautiful woman's throat, followed by a grunting, as if from a creature wallowing in mud, a wolf 's howling, as if not belonging to her, from beyond the horizon, an old man's cough, a sound that combined mooing, baaing, and bleating, to which actual animal noises seemed to respond from the distance, here a jay's squawking,
there the fluting of a nightingale, there the whistling of a red kite, shriller than any referee's whistle.
For the first steps on the path she hopped along in a squat, her mouth awry, her tongue hanging out like an idiot's. She stank, and was smeared with her own excrement. But at the same time, her eyes: what pride, what clarity and calm, such as one sees only in the heroine of a film, in the most disturbing scenes as well.
She of all people, whose ideal was the Taylor system, originally devised for the assembly line in factories, to assure that every motion would represent the ultimate in coordination and efficiency, focused on the product, although she applied it to life apart from the assembly line and production—she, in a mess that could not be uglier, more unworthy of a human being? No. For this was not a hopeless confusion but an almost holy one.
Negra aventura,
black adventure? Black and white?
She stood up. Her lips twitched, particularly the lower one; yet not for speaking. She jingled the last few chestnuts and other nuts in her pocket: in the old tales these had been the basic sustenance of the most solitary adventurers. A rumble of thunder directly in front of her: her own breath. She moved backward, and not only for the first few steps. For a while she swayed as she walked, even staggering now and then. Later she noticed that she really was barefoot.
Farther down the mountain she found herself in a strip of forest, and encountered the most harmless and at the same time most terrible plague of the Sierra (actually there were no other plagues, only dangers): the flies.
Even before the sun, with the warmth rising from the lowlands, they buzzed around one, small, almost delicate, also soundless, hardly corporeal, except that there were myriads of them, as in the old stories, and as soon as one paused for a moment, myriads upon myriads, not biting flies, but rather the kind that merely brushed against one, though constantly, and not only brushing but also flying into one's mouth (see above), or, when one shut one's mouth, into one's nostrils, far in, likewise into one's ears, and in particular into one's eye sockets; no sunglasses and no scarf could be so tight that they would not slip inside, and scads of them.
And this tongue of forest—the flies kept to the forest—went on forever. The flies clustered on one's face, in one's eyes, in one's nose—buzzed and circled around all the small orifices in one's head, without letting up for a breath, without letting one breathe at all. And now you
could not even stop, despite your thirst, at a trickle of water that finally turned up: already the myriads have whirled through your eyes into your sinuses, and thence under your scalp—a diabolical breed, even if they do no more than tickle, brush, and bump lightly against you.
But, strange to say: that morning this did not upset her. Any other hiker would have slapped at his head every few steps, just missing his face, hit his nose, knocked his glasses off (see “author's own experience,” as with the Sierra nettles)—a grotesque sight from a distance, where the dot-sized flies are not visible: she went on unaffected, even in the (close-up) blackest swarms of flies.
Was she already, or still, lying there dying? But wait: would a dead person walk in hops, as she did intermittently, or slide along on the balls of her feet? And one time, at a sharp bend in the road, she waded through a pile of leaves, a sort of leafy dune that reached way above her hips, and she heard her footsteps becoming heavy and slow, like those of an old man with whom she had walked through leaves long ago, those of her grandfather, the singer. And wasn't that an image, an “auditory image”? “Auditory images are not the images that were lost,” she said. “And was she now, at last, ready to sing?” “No, not yet.”
It was also in the forest with the flies that when she spread her arms one time and “stretched,” her child came to mind, who had once responded to just such a posture, such a stretch, with a look of dismay and shame, for her, her mother. Her raised arms, victorious, in the pose of a victor, had been slapped down then by her child.
And in the same instant, in that deserted forest, a cork-oak forest dense with foliage, she felt herself seen by the vanished girl, through the leaves, which were reminiscent of the oak leaves on playing cards. Time and again, when the two of them had agreed to rendezvous somewhere, she had hunted in vain for the child. And every time she had been spotted by the girl first, at a distance, even in a large crowd, and every time the child would then be standing in front of, next to, behind her, no matter how the mother had scoured the scene; or she, the mother, crammed in among thousands of heads, heard her calling, as if she were miles away and at the same time right by her eardrum. A mother-daughter odyssey? In spite of everything, that was not enough for her. Her face-seeking eyes, her eye-seeking eyes, no longer sought only her own child.
Out of the fly forest, and with that, out of the Sierra de Gredos. Before her on the plain the big little town of Candeleda, olive trees, figs,
palms. A crisscrossing of the warm, almost sultry air currents from the south and the breezes from high up at the summit plain, and above there a cloud in which one now saw another “barrier cloud,” then the fluffy little formation known in the region as a “butterfly cloud”; in her mouth the taste of tar steaming in the heat, blending with that of new-fallen snow.
Advancing toward the town at the foot of the mountains by a side path that snaked along a narrow, vertical depression, not unlike a foxhole, quite typical of the southern spurs of the Sierra. She asked a child for the date and time, and received precise information. At sunrise, on the sunken path, in the midst of the fields, among orange trees, she turns back once more toward the massif, already shrouded in the blue of distance. And so, walking backward again on the last stretch to Candeleda: the Sierra veiled, an enormous box taking up the whole horizon, yet light in weight.
One of the torrents from above, broadening beside the path into a stream, which widens as it leaves the mountains into deep, clear pools, called
“piscina natural.”
Letting herself down on the bank and plunging her entire body into the water, diving under, at first not to swim but simply to drink. And drinking and swimming along with her, the little animal brought from the Sierra, the tiny little man-frog.
And if this were a fairy tale, she would have drunk the brook dry in a few gulps. She lay on her stomach, her head underwater, and—yes, gulped. Our orderly adventurer gulped and gulped and gulped. And her thirst was of the sort that not even the waters of the torrent called Garganta Santa María, formed from the confluence of the Garganta Blanca, the White Torrent, and the Garganta Lobrega (from “wolf” or “she-wolf”), could quench.
With her thirst still unquenched, next came swimming. Swimming while drinking more. Then washing her clothes. Strange, the flakes of ashes in the fabric, as if from lava. Quick drying on a block of granite in the sun. Mending, darning, ironing (with a smooth, heavy, hot stone). Polishing her shoes (with a cream manufactured up there in Hondareda: wasn't there a time when quite a few companies produced, along with their main products, almost all the little necessities for their employees?). Makeup (from Hondareda). Perfume (from Hondareda, where else?). Upon slipping off her shoes: what a liberation that had been; one could suffer from shoe rage, as from prison rage.
Only much later the appearance of other people by the water. This turned out to be a region of late sleepers, like the entire Iberian Peninsula, by the way (except for Hondareda, of course). A man spoke to her as she strolled in a wide arc through the town to the railroad station—now a train route ran through the valley of the río Tiétar; on her previous crossings of the Sierra there had been no mention of it. And what did the stranger say? He asked: “¿Sois amorada? Are you in love?”
Remarkable how many men spoke to her, without a moment's hesitation, and not merely in this particular hour, simply addressed her, in a casual way, as good neighbors, or, to use a local word,
“compadres.”
Might that have to do with the fact that this
aventurera
was not like many other women, who with strangers put on an absent or even forbidding expression, lighting up only when they caught sight of the one man who was theirs? That this vagabond looked at any stranger with open, laughing eyes that promptly instilled trust—precisely their deep-black color had that effect—almost like an idiot, if it were not for her sovereign, yes, sovereign, and at the same time cheerful and, yes, compassionate beauty?
Yet remarkable, on the other hand, that this woman, once she catches sight of the one man who is hers, will have assumed a veritable scowl, the kind of look that, given the dark black of her eyes, almost, and not merely “almost,” inspires fear?
When, precisely, she traveled from Candeleda to the village in La Mancha, she told the author there, was of no significance for their tale. It was enough that it was long after Candlemas (= Candelaria) and the month of Ramadan and the festival of unleavened bread, and sometime between Sukkoth, the Buddhist Dugout Festival, and All Souls' Day. “The angels of the night and the day follow upon one another and watch over you,” she read during the train trip in the Arabic book belonging to her vanished child.
The Sierra de Gredos had still been visible from Liubovia, then still from Navamoral (= Mulberry Hollow) de la Mata, and, finally, on the bus trip from Talavera de la Reina in the direction of Toledo and Ciudad Real: until long after Talavera and after the crossing of the río Tajo, whenever she turned around in her seat in the back of the bus, the blooming of the blue mountain to the north, far, far off, with white crags at the top: so, up on the summit plain the first snow had fallen again.
She had taken her time once more: spent the night in Talavera (= Cutting Edge)-of-the-Queen in the hotel by the bus station; in Toledo she had herself poled across the río Tajo in the one-man ferry, from the city to the rocky steppe, and, far out in the meadow on the other side of the river, tracked down the remote church dedicated to the patron saint of Toledo, who was unfamiliar to most residents, and from whom she had taken one of her daughter's several names, along with Lubna, Salma, Ibna, etc.
The following night she spent in Orgaz, already deep in La Mancha, quite barren and also well above the altitude of the Tajo valley. And the next day she strolled through the capital of La Mancha, Ciudad Real, spent hours gazing at the prehistoric archeological finds there, and toward
evening took the only bus to the spot where she was scheduled to meet the author.
The return to conventional time was not as distasteful to her as one might have assumed. She could still feel inside her the alternate time dispensation of her crossing of the Sierra, providing an additional impetus that would not leave her that soon. Also no brooding as to what the future held.
Since the loss of images, there was, to be sure, no more “and,” that sweet, duration-forging link between her steps. Yet on the other hand she had her story inside her, there to pass on to others. She took in current events as current events, and these brushed against her story without disrupting it—indeed, some news, world happenings, or historic events that had occurred in the meantime actually reinforced what she had experienced, precisely by way of contrast, lent her experiences colorful outlines and backgrounds.
While she had been crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the first manned spacecraft had landed on Mars. The highway signs throughout Europe and the rest of the world now indicated the hours, minutes, and seconds in neon lights. The final communiqué from a global presidents' summit conference announced: “At last we all speak a single language.” The president of a poor country asked the Universal Bank for money, pledging that his country would “show itself worthy of the community of deal-makers.” A new pope again asked in the name of his Church for forgiveness for something for which there could be no forgiveness, at most dissolution of the Church. Africa was declared the “continent of peace” for the coming decade (and the black faces pictured in that connection made that seem almost credible, and, above all, possible). Belgrade, the other riverport city and sister city of hers in the northwest, had been recently, for the second or third time in its history, conquered by the Turks, and the victorious second-in-command, the author of a book called
Jogging Through Turkey,
stood in his jogging suit at the spot where the Save flows into the Danube, waving a bundle of money, and at the same time pissing into the confluence of the rivers. Aquileia had become the capital of Italy. Ancient Greek had again become a required subject in schools from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Dog owners proclaimed that anyone who was not a friend of animals was an enemy of mankind. And—no “and”—her favorite team—no, not the one from Valladolid—Football Club Numancia, had in the meantime beaten FC Barcelona and Real Madrid and become the
Iberian champions: the Europe Cup game against Manchester United was about to take place. (To judge by that, wasn't everything about which she cared passionately threatened with extinction after all?) And: Spain had abolished the upside-down question mark at the beginning of questions. ¿True?
Upon the bus's arrival in the La Mancha village it was already night. The bus station was almost as big as a city terminal. The village itself, though only a hamlet, spread far out into the
meseta
. Centuries earlier it, not Ciudad Real, had been the capital of La Mancha. Nonetheless it had had in those days, as it did today, the air (yes, air) of a village, a
pueblo
. The author took her home with him for the night and the telling of her story; his house, as he told her at once, should help her feel at home, for it had been in the village's days as the capital a sort of storehouse for goods and money, owned by her colleague and predecessor Jakob Fugger, a branch of his business in the middle of sixteenth-century Spain, turned over to the banking emperor by Emperor Charles as compensation for the imperial debt to the House of Fugger.
The bus station was a barracks in the middle of the otherwise empty square (“not to be confused with the Plaza Mayor, the main square”), housing both the ticket counter and a bar. At first she did not recognize the author; took him for a
labrador
, a land or field worker, a rather haggard and ragged one.
Yet he, too, looked right past her as she got off the bus with the last passengers. Had she changed that much? It was true: it had not been possible to cover the scrapes and scabs with makeup. Yet her face always remained the same!: so it was probably the fault of the author, who was often uncertain about precisely those people of whom he had a clear mental image when they, whom he was expecting, suddenly stood before him.
So for the moment she let him go on hunting for her and behind his back ordered something to drink at the bar (her thirst from the Sierra was still with her). Only then did she come up behind the man and grab him under the arms, and at last he recognized her. And he seemed familiar to her now, as if not from their first encounter but from somewhere else entirely.
As the two of them made their way to his storehouse in the village, the night was chilly. Altogether, on this last leg of her journey, even though she had been heading south all the while, it had become noticeably colder. The huge village square was strewn with sand, which crunched under
their feet as only frozen sand could crunch. Not another soul was out on the village streets then, despite the rather early hour; no
corso
, no evening strolling by the population; yet the
aldea
so deep in the Iberian south.
The author's
almacén
, or warehouse, lay on the edge of the village. It had no windows on the sides overlooking the street and alley. The windows it did have faced on the grass- and scree-covered steppe that surrounded all the rather sparse settlements in La Mancha, which were often half a day's journey apart. The other village houses, as well as the astonishingly many churches, also seemed to be built on the edge of the savannah; one of the churches was even located far out in the grassland, and was dedicated to Santa María de las Nieves, Mary of the Snows; from the window of the guest room she could see this snow church—without snow—standing in the moonlight.
They had passed through a spacious, empty vestibule and entered the inner courtyard of the former warehouse, where a gallery running all around the one upper story—marble columns and shallow Moorish arches in a delicate, light-colored clay brick—gave the impression of a miniature palace, not a royal one but a rustic, peasant one. In the inner courtyard the giant seedpods of a baobab tree rustled in the night wind.
She had been shown up to her room and left there while her host put the finishing touches on the evening meal, for which he refused to accept her help. “My housekeeper has the day off”—these were his words.
In her room, again something between a chamber and a storeroom, she changed her clothes. The supposed chef 's tunic that she had had with her the entire time in her pack was in actuality a dress, and it was also not white but revealed, when she had put it on, at least here and there, completely different colors, which flowed into each other as she moved, and for which there were no names—at least none recognized by the master of the house, who could distinguish about a thousand colors but hardly knew a name for one of them.
As she descended the broad brick steps—so broad because they had been used for moving goods to the storage areas—he also noticed that she was barefoot. Yes, since the loss of her shoes on that morning of leave-taking from the Sierra, she had gone barefoot, and he was the first to notice this, or rather, the first she allowed to notice; for she continued to have it in her power, if not to be invisible, then to be overlooked by the world around her.
They ate their evening meal in the hall or main storeroom, adjacent to the patio—crammed with junk, or at least stuff that looked like junk—with a glass door (no window in the room) looking out on the Mancha steppe. As befitted her, and their, story, and especially its last chapter, there was a fireplace by the table, quite a tiny one, and not only in proportion to the hall, and the fire in it smoldered more than it burned or blazed, and the author then allowed it to go out, intentionally, as he said: “For gazing into a fire has always tended to distract me; unlike running water, it puts me to sleep, hypnotizes me, pulls me away, in an unproductive sense, from the matter at hand, or what should be the matter at hand.” —“Me, too,” she replied. But they did not feel cold, and that was the result, among other things, of her telling and his listening.
While she told him the story of crossing the Sierra de Gredos and the loss of images, she noticed that the listener was increasingly usurping her story, the story. Usurping? Absorbing it? More the latter, if also in the sense that it, in turn, the story, was passed to him, and at times also literally entered him, like a demon? yes, but not an evil demon, rather one that one might almost wish would circulate inside one as long as possible, working its magic. The stooped author pulled himself together and sat up straight. To be sure, at moments this also caused him to sway.
And she, the storyteller? Time and again as she recounted her adventures, she was filled, in retrospect, with a horror of which there had been not so much as a hint at the moment of the experience. At one point, in the middle of a paragraph, she even found herself on the verge of breaking off the story—a child's crib on the edge of a precipice, tipping (another image after all?)—and for good: the story would end there, would thus not even come into being. For she saw herself still lying in the fern hollow, helpless and unable to move, completely and utterly alone.
And wasn't she in fact still lying there in the dark? Was in reality not here, safe and sound in human company? The retroactive trembling familiar from so many adventure stories came over her. But wasn't this, on the other hand, the unmistakable sign of a proper adventure? Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence. In between they both shuddered. But without this shuddering the journey would not have deserved the name. That alone was what validated a journey.
Before the two of them, now calm and wide awake, discussed the loss of images, the author remarked, at the end of her tale—which, nota bene,
was only the provisional end—perhaps not in complete seriousness, that he, as a man who had of necessity turned his back on the world, at least the social world, would have wished to hear more about money and banking. Her response: first of all, there was enough written about her as the powerful banker, a modern-day Jakob Fugger (“That was once upon a time”); and, second, there had been plenty said on the subject in the current story, directly and even more indirectly; and, third—this she now dictated to the author: “Yes, money is a mystery. But here more mysteries are at stake than the mystery of money or secret bank accounts.”
It goes without saying that the author, like all the earth's inhabitants at the time of this story, had experienced the loss of images long before her, the heroine. Yet, nota bene again! the loss of images did not mean that images no longer flashed and flared through the world or that no one noticed and/or registered these flashing and flaring images at least now and then. And here began the nocturnal discussion between the adventurer and her author of the loss of images—which at the same time was a conversation of both parties with themselves—each one of their soliloquies was evoked by the other's, and so forth.
“The image sparks, the will-o'-the-wisp images within us—no, these are no will-o'-the-wisps—continue to occur, flashing and flaring into our midst.”—“Except that they no longer have any effect. Or no: they could perhaps continue to have an effect. But I am no longer capable of taking them in and letting them affect me.”—“What affects me instead is the ready-made and prefabricated ones, images controlled from the outside and directed at will, and their effect is the opposite of the old ones.”—“These new images have destroyed those other images, the image per se, the source. Particularly in the century just past, the original sources and deposits of images were ruthlessly raided, in the end disastrously. The natural vein has been stripped, and people now cling to the synthetic, mass-produced, artificial images that have replaced the reality that was lost along with the original images, that pretend to be them, and even heighten the false impression, like drugs, as a drug.”

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