Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (7 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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Many trees, too, instead of knocking down the tree next to them, had been caught by the more robust younger tree. Often the uprooted giants hung with their crowns tangled in the branches of the still upright neighboring tree, usually actually two such upright trees, one on the right and one on the left, suggesting the inescapable image of a warrior fallen to his knees in a Homeric—or at least not present-day—battle.
Added to this the sounds, as a gentle wind sprang up, of the living and dead limbs scraping against each other overhead: a whispering and chirping. This sound, however, drowned out more and more by a splitting and crashing clear across the forest: as the subsoil thawed with lightning rapidity, many of the trees lost their last foothold, one after the other, trees
that the hurricane had battered down to their very roots but which until now had been merely cracked. Although the wind now came only in mild gusts, there began, all around, out of the clear blue sky, a paroxysm of falling, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but cumulatively massive. One giant began to tip, almost gently, a jerk at a time, until all that remained, without any sound of its hitting the ground, was the space where it had stood, with a shimmering phantom image of its branches; on another tree the heavy crown suddenly split off; a third had the ground pulled out from under it in an instant; and amid all the bursting and crashing sounds, seeming to answer each other from every corner of the forest, suddenly complete stillness would set in; not even a whisper from the wind. She did not stir from the spot. Was she so sure of being out of danger? Or might a single step of hers trigger a succession of falls around her?
Then, as the wind picked up, the falling suddenly ceased; not a single tree coming down. A glance at the sky: the majority of the trees that had not fallen were leaning steeply, and almost at an identical angle, which made it look as though those still more or less standing upright, clearly the minority, were leaning. Was one leaning oneself, about to tip out of the picture? And again: Was this now? And wasn't it something other than, and more than, today's date?
A glance at the ground: in the thawing mud, and all the more distinct, the marks of paws, hooves, bird feet, shoe treads, crowded together, as if on a path, imprinted there as if from long ago; and someone with bare feet had also joined this procession; is joining it; will have joined it. And now, at forehead level in the more than merely thinned-out forest, at sunrise, the glow of the luxuriant wild rhododendrons typical of the northwest, hardly any solitary bushes, but dense colonies girdling the hill, as tall as a full-grown man, picked out of the gloom and barrenness, at the moment of the wind's breaking through and of the first rays of sun, as the only bright spot in the battered forest, a swaying radiance emanating from these earth-hugging creatures; from head to foot and, from the vanguard to the rear guard, a violent yet also even, small-caliber blinking, gleaming, flashing from the rhododendrons' evergreen foliage, in the same sunlit moment representing a sort of procession, caravan, or, most persistently, work detail or squad, marching in place and at the same time advancing and passing by, lingering while also constantly setting out, and the glinting comes from belt buckles, from headbands, from the braid on sleeves,
but above all from the tools they are carrying, pocket calculators as well as sonar devices, hand telephones with a screen as well as the apparently long since obsolete handsaws, masons' spatulas (in a strange, streamlined form), kerosene lanterns. Involuntarily she broke into a run, unaccustomed though she was from her native village and in general to running: an obstacle course, which seemed most appropriate for her.
No, it was now after all; with the wind in the branches, it was the present, though with an admixture of other time periods; the present as it had always been. In the thumping of trains over the railroad ties could also be heard the booming of cannon firing a hundred years earlier and the creaking and screeching of wheels as horse-drawn conveyances mounted the steepest stretch of road through the forest, where they always slid back a bit, a backsliding that occurred despite the extra team hitched on at the relay station at the base of the hill. And the root craters from the hurricane would soon merge with the nearby bomb craters from the previous century, in this very forest.
This grander present, this grander time: “Behind the hubbub of the storm, behind the trunks and limbs fallen helter-skelter and lying on top of one another,” she told the author, “one glimpsed the present, the unadulterated present, as a park? as a garden?—as a clearing—as an enclosure. What just a moment ago had been a hurricane-blasted forest now revealed itself as an enclosure, and so these words came to mind: The enclosure of the grander time, and one thought: When will this kind of time finally prevail? When will it finally determine everything else?”
The author's response: Was this thought part of her mission, like her belief in images? Her only reply: “No questions!” and she went on speaking as though she had not heard him. “What a delight time can be. No, what a delicacy it is. One would like to bite into it and eat it, nourish oneself with it. And it is nourishing in a way. When my daughter was a child, she would express her sense of time like this: ‘It has been a long time since I have eaten an apple!' And now, when I came out of the forest, it occurred to me that I, who am famous for having time—‘She has so much time, and in a position like hers!'—had to set out at once.”
To stay here. To stay here? Now she clearly heard a cuckoo calling, in the middle of January, an echo from a dream. Did she jingle the change in her pocket? She hardly ever carried cash, and certainly not coins. Yet shortly before her departure she gave herself permission to be superstitious. Clinging to her hiking shoes was a mountain thistle, a kind that did
not grow anywhere in the woods here. She ran into a neighbor whose obituary had been posted for days in all the local shops. So he was alive? And who had died in his stead? Long ago, in the Sorbian village, more than one person had greeted her grandfather, when he came into town after a longish absence, with the question, “What, you're not dead? Everyone was saying you died the day before yesterday!”
The enclosure of the grander time: what powerful gusts! And what phantom gusts now. At last she was sure about her journey. One way or the other she would learn something from it. And she would find a treasure, though not the kind one could seize possession of. Yes, was she a treasure-seeker, then? She had always been seeking a treasure, and always for others.
In that hour of departure, her rejected suitor had also crossed her path. In spite of the early hour, he was sitting on a bench by the railroad tracks, and she changed course to meet him, as if even from him she expected to receive a portent, as earlier from a flight of birds high in the sky. He gazed right past her, however, and not intentionally: he had simply failed to recognize her. Had the two of them ever really exchanged a word? And besides, he was not alone: at second glance he could be seen to have a small child on his lap, the child and he forming a pair—the pair on the bench, above a long, swooping curve in the rails, following, with simultaneous and perfectly coordinated head movements, the trains, of which one came into view every few minutes, gathering speed as it reached the city limits or already at full throttle.
And that morning she had also wanted to find an omen in the idiot of the outskirts, who had been circling, as usual, starting early in the day, with his long stride, back and forth and going nowhere in particular, and this all day long and all days long. She plucked at his jacket sleeve as she passed, thinking that she would give him a coat if she ever returned to her region (an odd thought, since the journey was planned for hardly more than a few days, and besides there would be no ocean to cross).
As always, the idiot had been marching down the middle of the street, in goose step and swinging his arms, playing the part of a local dignitary, walking and walking, and he had continued on his rounds with sovereign indifference to her plucking, showing the world his Caesarian profile, like that on a coin. He merely turned his bald, spherical head toward her as he sped past (his round face looking back between his shoulders) and burst out with one of his oracular utterances, to which others, and she as well, usually paid no attention. He bawled it out with all his
lung power, his lips smeared with black as if with coal: “Ablaha! That means: idiot woman! For other women the sex foam, for you the octopus cloud! Octopus in the mountains! Madness is my currency. And what is yours?” (The author's comment: “Ablaha—a good name for you. That's what I'll call you from time to time in your, in my, story.”) And then the idiot suddenly stopped dead, drawing in air with his throat and head, and saying: “I have a long story to tell about you, too. Woman, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and without fury!”
Time and again, thresholds of departure before she finally set out. Much time has elapsed since that morning, but at least two of these thresholds still exist, in memory and physically, in that location, and someone familiar with the place will gladly guide one reader or another to them. One of the thresholds consists of the rows of stalagmite bumps on the bottom landing of the staircase that leads up to the small suburban railroad station; for as long as anyone can remember, there has been dripping from the rails above down through the leaky ceiling, and the dripping will continue: up above it takes the form of whitish, nail-shaped stalactites, dozens of them, crowded together, while on the ground below it forms round humps or bumps, which, when one makes a point of walking on them, fit into the tread of one's shoes and give one's steps a sort of bounce—the steps of those departing as well as of those arriving: in short, a threshold.
And the second threshold: in the most densely built-up area, a patch of unpaved road, impossible to pave, for the roots of two enormous chestnut trees protrude mightily from the ground, grown into and crossing each other, forming a root skein wider than a brook, diagonally across the road, poking up majestically like mountain ranges, and the hollows between them gorges, and one of the roots, all knobby, surmounting the others, skyward, forming what geologists call the
Gipfelflur
, the summit plain: as if prefiguring the mountain range she planned to cross in a three-day hike on her way to the author in La Mancha—the Sierra de Gredos: the pointed knob here representing the highest peak there, the Pico de Almanzor.
Now and back then, balancing from root to root, from ridge to ridge, committing to memory distances and footholds. Fortunately the hurricane had left both chestnut trees standing, and since that time no storm remotely as violent has swept through the area around the riverport city.
Other departure thresholds that had no external form and no visible existence, that exist only in the telling?: a glimpse into a garden familiar and beloved from before the storm because of the cedar there: no more cedar, which meant that the house had become a different house. And, on the other hand, houses that had always looked completely abandoned—and now after the storm it became apparent that they had been secretly inhabited, and would remain inhabited, and obviously so in the future. And the layers of the past revealed around the houses by the storm: in a garden, as if behind a curtain suddenly ripped away, the spoked wooden wheel of an antediluvian farm wagon; in the next one the outdoor pump that had been heaved out of the ground; and on one of the houses here on the outskirts the porch roof, supported by round granite columns that had remained hidden all these years, their capitals carved before most of the city's monuments: an eagle with eyes wide open and wings also spread wide—whose dance she imitated without anyone's being able to tell that she was dancing.
The smallest pretext used for delay. Was there such a thing: energetic delaying? Gathering energy from delaying? Narrative delaying?
Back on her property, turning off the switches (even the light switches, in the latest style, actually turned again), and turning on one of the lights again—let that lamp stay on for her not-distant return. Stopping at the door and going back to shake out her bedding, all the bedding, as if for the evening of that same day. Likewise half-opening the closed shutters. Taking some leftover food out of the freezer again. Amid the meticulous order left behind by the janitorial crew—she used the same one as her high-rise bank down by the confluence of the two rivers, the entire crew for just one hour each month—messing things up in one or two places (it looked almost like an escape route). Slicing an apple (the cut surface would turn brown even before nightfall). Turning off the alarm. Putting logs in all the fireplaces, ready to be lit. Switching on the radio on the kitchen table (at the lowest volume). Putting milk out by the bush for the hedgehog (several bowls at once). Retrieving some of the balls hidden everywhere in the bushes and rolling them back and forth between the fruit trees. Sniffing the withered quince. Unlocking one of the garden's side gates (after a period of electronically operated locks, keys had come back into their own; everyone in the riverport city carried a bunch on his belt, or somewhere else—the idiot of the outskirts had the largest
bunch). Pausing in front of the boy from the gatekeeper's lodge, who was standing just then by the main gate, had the hiccups, and held out his two fists to her: Left or right? Picking one fist (one hand seemed as left as the other): Is this crumpled-up drawing supposed to be her? As a girl? Pocketing the drawing and placing her key in his open hand, the one and only key to open almost all the doors on the property.
On the side streets—with the exception of the road leading out of the city, which becomes a gleaming highway at its vanishing point, just past the city limits, there were only side streets “in my town”—moving vans could be seen in several places that morning; unusual for people to move away from here, and evidently to somewhere entirely different. What has got into them that they are leaving “my area”? No, they are not doing this of their own free will; they must go, driven from their homes, poor things, especially the children! The piano hoisted out the window, the four-wheeler next to the tricycle, next to the bicycle: What good will they be far from “my land”? And that clan setting out with the heaviest luggage imaginable—even the wheels make it no lighter—for the railway stations: Why must you leave this place, you pathetic figures, and why for so long? why going so far? But isn't she also one of these figures, dragging themselves with stooped backs out beyond the city limits? “No, I am traveling light, with my hands free. The one you see over there is only my double.”
The winter/January traveler was last seen turning and walking backward until she disappeared from view: a considerable stretch on the straight, steeply rising main road out of town. From the two rivers down below the crackling of the thawing ice floes as they gallop toward the sea, one piggybacking on the other. Up there the crest of the throughway, with the glint of a pass.
It is still early in the day. Plenty of time! (The greeting customary in these parts.) Before night's end, which had been just a short while ago, almost her only companions being objects and their outlines, trees, houses, empty streets, the only sound the hooting of owls, taking on the contours of an endlessly repeated Arabic letter; and just after that the great majority of the animals, morning birds, ravens, blackbirds, falcons; and just after that the suddenly swelling swarm of pedestrians, among them not a few schoolchildren, all still in the darkness; and after that an hour in which machines dominated the scene, cars, planes, tractor-trailers, helicopters, with the passersby reduced to background figures, the animals (especially the birds) to sporadic undertones; and now, with the woman's,
“Ablaha's,” vanishing up on the pass, that interval, still half-morning, half-midday, when with or without sunshine the whole region is going full blast, and yet stillness returns, a sort of second stillness, in which the machines, too, including the noisiest ones, have subsided into a kind of backdrop of activity, the occasional clatter of a helicopter, the drone of a motorcycle now almost reduced to memories, like the TV antennas, whether arrow-shaped or parabolic, and only the smoke rising straight up from the chimneys represents the present and creates a foreground reaching to the horizon on all sides (“hearth”: Wasn't that once another word for “home”?), one step at a time the area around the rivercity was re-created in its morning guise, this time as well, today once again, or it reconstituted itself, embodied a being of flesh and blood, earth and fire, din and silence, a mighty being, a planet that in spite of everything still rose from the dead each day, stretching to its outer limits, not so much bursting with life as infinitely elastic.
Yes, a special planet had forced, pushed, fought, elbowed its way into the light of the world (so yesterday morning had not been the last time after all). And what reinforced this impression was precisely the fact that the area served as a transit point or passageway and as an intersection or junction and place of exchange—witness the bank building at the confluence of the rivers—for all continental and transcontinental movements. How would her area manage without her? How would her planet survive without her?
Perhaps she continued to walk backward for a while longer. But by the time she reached the top of the pass she had been striding full speed ahead for a good while. She did not even look back; presumably the so-called lady banker did not look back even once at her so-called riverport city down below, at her so-called planet! Not one thought for us here, no image of me in my narrow galley of a room, no good wishes sent from up there to us down here, the hiccups of the boy in front of the gatekeeper's lodge long since switched off, the drawing tossed in the trash, the drawing with her face most likely twisted into the grimace on a clumsily forged banknote!
Yet as she crossed the first lane of the highway she had almost been run over by a truck. And even before that, the garden gate, snapping shut, had almost jammed her fingers. And while still in the house, luggage in hand, she had missed one of the several stair steps and for a scary moment had teetered on the verge of a major fall (a young woman in the
neighborhood, whom she of course did not know—only I know of this accident, and hardly anyone shares my dismay—recently fell to her death this way).
And far from being relieved at having been spared, she had actually been indignant. Indignant? Yes, indignant at the thought that her trip might have come to naught; she would have missed the Sierra de Gredos; she would not have seen the village in La Mancha where her so-called author lived; she would not have been able to recount her other life, unofficial, but for her all the more characteristic, to this self-appointed, so-called author! In reality, this disloyal woman was even glad to get away for a while from her “leeched-out” country, from “this suburban life, beset by tedium—suburbaniting being the equivalent of rusticating,” “the life there, often measurable only in numbers and in countdowns, only in seconds, minutes, hours, instead of in moments, daydreams, surges, inhaling and exhaling. Desiring, letting go, desiring all the more.” What kind of desiring? What kind of desiring? Already she is too far away; she cannot hear me anymore. Did she ever hear me? Will she ever hear me? (The narrator here, dear reader, will not chime in again for quite a while.)
While crossing the top of the low pass, up there on the highest crest of the straight-as-a-die highway, she sang. Exotic singing, even for this day and age when the most unfamiliar tones, those of pygmies or other aboriginal peoples, can apparently belong to everyone. Singing without words; or rather with words, but in an idiom that no one understood, not even the singer herself—but what was there to understand? A singing analogous to riding; high in the saddle? but without a horse.
She had become once more the adventurer she had always been. And she had already survived the first adventure of this sortie, if only a minor one, right after she crossed the city limits: a man in a car had recognized her despite her disguise, which excited him all the more (a celebrity defenseless in the wild), and pulled up next to her, not only pointing to the backseat with his thumb but at the same time grabbing for her with his other hand. Through his open window she had struck him in the face with her bag, which she was still carrying over her arm, so hard that he tipped forward, his foot slipping off the brake, and involuntarily stepped on the accelerator—the car lurched forward and was already shooting past; what else could the driver do now but get out of there—but from the look in his eyes it was clear that she had made another enemy, an irreconcilable one, and he would take revenge, not immediately, for this was not
the moment, but the moment would come. And once again that was fine with her: beyond the borders of her area she knew she was in enemy territory.

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