Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (14 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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As a child he had already feared any kind of observer, he continued. He had learned early to ride a horse, in secret. But the first time someone watched him ride, he had promptly fallen off. When he and others had shown off how well they could shinny up an oak tree, he had been the only one to get stuck halfway up the thick trunk (he could still see himself hanging there, on the lone tree in the middle of the cow pasture, and
slowly sliding back down the trunk)—and when he had tried it again alone, he had reached the top faster than the fastest one in the group. And his fear of observers had then become a sort of hatred of them. Yes, he hated observers—of whatever sort. Even love was in danger of turning to hate, or to irritation, which was just as bad, when the loved one stood watching him do something he could do only when he was alone. And (here he laughed once) almost everything that mattered to him, and particularly his cooking, was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved.
Here his second guest chimed in briefly. The entrepreneur—or whatever he was on this evening—said that precisely a rhythm that was broken here and there, the interruption at some stages, the loss of all rhythm at certain moments while the food was cooking, the cook's palpable state of intimidation and his hesitation during individual transitions in the complicated preparation process, made the phases that came before and after—when he was working alone in the kitchen, undisturbed by her, the other person—all the more significant, accounting ultimately for the lasting impression, the “fabulous” aftertaste, which was no less “real” than the first direct impression this evening meal made on the palate, “which I—and this is no mere turn of phrase—will never forget. O infinite alphabet of taste.” Hadn't the tasting they had all done been a form of spelling-out and also memorizing or recollecting?
The last word in their dinner-table conversation belonged to the banker (or whatever she was, and not only on this night). She remarked that it had not been her intention at all to call the meal into question. On the subject of “my lord chef” as a person, she had also meant something else entirely. In contrasting his way of doing things with the notion of “the whole person must take part,” she had been intent on working through a problem, “which in turn is part of my profession.” And now as a threesome they had just worked through this problem.
As far as she herself was concerned, she had recognized during the working-through that she was exactly the opposite. She could undertake a task as a “whole person” only in the presence of someone else, a “third party,” even if the third party existed only in her imagination. So as “to walk,” or “merely to take one step,” “to calculate,” or “merely to type up numbers,” “to draft a plan,” or “merely to fiddle with possible combinations” as a whole person, she had to be able to picture observers, and beyond that inspectors, “judges,” so to speak, as if she were “in a contest, no,
a competition!” “onstage, no, in an arena!” Even when looking at something as simple as a spoon or a piece of string, for instance, she felt a sort of obligation to view the string “as a whole person,” “or vice versa, when being looked at, to allow myself to be looked at by the other person, or animal, as a whole person!”
Yet as she sat there now: no one else's gaze could get to her, and not only because of her eyes behind the giant key. There nothing was looking at me, let alone a whole person. And above all nothing allowed itself to be looked at by us, let alone … “In her way of not letting herself be looked at from time to time she resembled less an actress on the screen and definitely more a policeman on the street. He may look at me—if by no means as a whole person—, but does not allow himself to be looked at, not in the slightest, even when he is standing a hand's breadth from me.” So that night she did not have the last word after all?
Who said that?—The author in La Mancha, in his village, much later. And he will have added, “The whole person must tell the story!” And she will have replied, beaten and battered as she will be by then, and still shaky from her time in the Sierra de Gredos: “What you call the policeman's gaze has in reality been my defense and my armor. And if I positioned myself time and again this close to another person, it was to leave that person no room for killing, and likewise no room for any kind of embrace. I moved in so close simply in order to become unapproachable. During a long period in my life I crowded in close, body to body, so that my enemies or adversaries could not lift their little finger against me. It has finally become clear to me: I acted this way—it was a constant, uninterrupted acting, and woe to me if I ever shrank back—because I feared death.”—The author: “And feared love?”—She: “For a long time that, too, was a kind of fear of death, a particularly bad, acute form.”
There are insinuations that my heroine spent that night near Tordesillas with a lover. In one version it was the chef and lord of the manor, in another the failed entrepreneur, in yet another an unnamed third person. But whatever the source: he is the false narrator. And the fellow is a false narrator not only because he offers false information, because he lies—and he is lying, in fact; he lies the gray slime out of the cracks in the ground—but the apocryphal swindler and slippery speculator is a false narrator furthermore because he is telling something that in my view ought not to be told—that in my view does not belong in a story, certainly not in this one here.
Our story here, even on the darkest night, and, I would hope, at some point also the hottest night, must take place beneath the sky, the most spacious of skies. The aforementioned insinuations, however, do not take place under any sky. And besides, they do not take place; they are merely insinuated. And insinuations and ulterior motives are the very opposite of the sky, the one that arches above our heads, as well as that of storytelling—the antithesis of anything remotely connected with the heavens, including your heavenly body. The scoundrels who want to sneak into my book are merely pretending to tell a story. They are feinting, as in fencing. The minute they open their mouths, or rather their traps, they lie—and at the same time they lie like a book, and that is what is special about these literary liars, and what makes this old expression so appropriate again nowadays. But the problem is not that these no-goods and would-be competitors lie. If only it really were a problem; problems, as we know, are productive.
I, too, lie, when the moment is ripe; I can lie the blue out of the sky and even more out of the darkest cracks in the ground. Yet the lies you false storytellers dish up—just to finish with this topic—are not exactly fiendish (you're all too dodgy and at the same time too stodgy, abandoned one and all by any kind of spirit, including the evil ones), but exactly the opposite. How, for instance, can my heroine spend a night with a toy merchant? And what serious reader would not shake his head at the suggestion that she lay that night in the arms of a chef (even if, on the evening in question, he may have had a golden touch in the kitchen for a change and is perhaps in fact a master of his métier—a métier grievously overvalued these days, in my humble opinion, by the way)?
The most likely scenario I could imagine for our woman would be a night of lovemaking with an unknown and invisible third person. Not a night of love but a night of struggle. A life-and-death struggle. In which she remained victorious in the end. Will have remained. Luckily for me. This way our story can continue.
But such a third person would also be counterfeit. He must not exist. He does not belong here. He does not come to my mind. He does not enter my mind. First of all, this story of ours takes place in a time when for not a few people physical union had come to represent something wonderful again, and accordingly something rare. And then, too, the moment for that, and especially the place for that, had not yet come in the story. A night of love in a castle was out of the question, even in the vicinity of the Sierra de Gredos.
The only touching that took place: she placed her hand on someone's shoulder before going to bed. She did not say whose. And when it came to the next touch she was already alone: having stepped into her room and closed the door behind her, she leaned against the door frame. As for the chef, he had already almost fallen asleep at the table; all his strength and sense of urgency had gone into the preparation of the meal. And as for the traveling entrepreneur, as he himself reported, he had been positively relieved to trot off to his solitary bed: ever since his collision with the lady banker, but not only because of that, he saw only danger in any encounter with a woman, and left the scene afterward with the thought: Scraped by again! Got out alive again!
Her brother traveled only by night, and that had always been the case, not merely since he had become a fugitive, or, as now, a deportee. They said it was because the accident involving his parents and the other brother had occurred in broad daylight. But what didn't “they” say. After a few weeks, he had run away from the boarding school (in those days they still kept the pupils locked in) to which his grandparents had taken him, hardly more than a child—at his own request, for he wanted to become a priest—after nightfall, and had set out, only ten years old, on the nocturnal pilgrimage, yes, pilgrimage, along country roads and across fields, back to the Sorbian village, more than thirty miles away; before sunrise he was suddenly standing beside his sister, who had been awakened by an unusual weight on her bed: an armful of early apples that her brother had picked in the orchard behind the house (it was the end of September). And this child who had returned home promptly named the different varieties: “Shepherd's Apples, found in the woods by a French shepherd.—Alexander Lukas, found in the woods around the year 1870 by a certain Alexander Lukas.—Princess of Angoulême, an old French variety, named after the daughter of Louis the Sixteenth, the king who was guillotined.—Dear Louise of Avranches.—Cox Orange: bred in 1830 by an Englishman named Cox.—Ontario: bred in 1887 on Lake Ontario in Canada.”
This time, too, her brother was traveling by night, through the long winter night, almost without stopping. Even his intermittent pauses were part of his traveling: waiting for a train connection; waiting for a car that finally stopped; waiting in a hiding place for guards and patrols to pass.
Cold, and hardly anything to eat: and yet he did not mind in the slightest traveling by night. So long as it was night: he did not need much more. Unlike her, he was in his element moving around at night. If she
was not already asleep, she had to be at her destination by midnight at the latest, in a house, close to a bed. He, on the other hand, even when he was not traveling, made his rounds in the dark, between dusk and dawn. During his years in prison, when he was not pacing or dancing around his cell at night, he lay on his cot, drawing spirals in the air, and if he happened to fall asleep for a bit, he felt even more imprisoned during such nocturnal sleep than he already was. The nights for him were made for sniffing out, tracking down, rummaging around. As a fifteen-year-old he had written poems, all of which had night as their subject. She still knew two lines from one of his night poems by heart: “Snakes on the prowl rummage through the stillness, / Night—and only the will lives!” Since that time she referred to her brother as “the night-rummager.” And now for all these years he had not been able to rummage through a single night. And waiting to be set free had had nothing in common with the waiting during his nocturnal journeys.
Sometimes her brother struck her as uncanny. At such moments she was afraid for him. And this fear was usually connected with fear for others, not merely for this person or that but several, many, a great many. True, he had not killed anyone yet; he had been sent to jail only for “violence against objects”—though destructive and repeated violence. Yet it was her fear, gaining strength with the years of his incarceration, that in the meantime he had set his heart on killing, or at least striking, massively.
Yet as a child, and also for a long time afterward, he had been completely incapable of hurting anyone; he simply could not defend himself or hit back; and even in the penitentiary, where he was stronger than most, on several occasions when he got into a scuffle, he let himself be beaten up without resisting—at most he cried out, in helplessness and rage, rage directed more at himself for having no talent for violence against people, against his own kind, for being absolutely incapable of violating the taboo zone—the other's stomach, chest, face; for not even being able to bring himself to trip the other man up or grab him by the nose or ear or put him in a headlock.
Fear for her brother: for in the end he had taken to signing his letters to her with an expression that had been popular long ago, used to brand history's notorious evildoers: “an enemy of mankind.” And since the contents of these letters seemed to fit this expression more and more—though in a sort of code; the two of them had had a secret language since childhood—his sister finally could not help believing it, not completely,
but almost: yes, her brother, the one with the litany of apple varieties, the one who had sat next to her for years in the dark of night, had really and truly become an enemy of mankind. And he would not be satisfied to leave it at that colorful epithet. Yes, wasn't her brother aware that, at the time of this book, fighting against anything or for anything was no longer possible? And that if he died in such a fight, his death would move no one—except her: as a man without parents, he was no victim, was a desperado from the outset; the death of a man without parents held no significance and did not count.

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