Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (17 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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Her principle, her ideal, her project: having time. Yes, as almost always in her life up to now, she had time. She had time and stood up to take her leave. It was up to her now to go forth into the land, the embodiment of that old German expression, now fallen into disuse, according to which the days went forth into the land; she would go forth into the land, just as, in another age, one that had never been graspable and countable or counting and valid, the days went forth into the land; had gone; will have gone.
Yet now a sort of dialogue sprang up between the innkeeper and the adventurer, as they stood facing one another in the Balkan courtyard in the middle of the
meseta
, and this, too, running counter to what was called dialogue in the era that is to be bypassed by her story, yet owing the energy for that bypassing to the era and, in the process of bypassing it, circumscribing the era all the more powerfully and making it recognizable, leaving it as a gray zone, untouched (similar to our heroine's arcane banking knowledge): the gray zone of a present day—“which does not deserve this name!” (so who was it who said that?)—left gray; hence nothing of the gray current era in my, your, our story, unless as a negative image, in which the gray may grow lighter or for moments begin to flicker and vibrate. And the scraps and fragments of many languages in the speech of
the masons, roofers, and carpenters, Slavic, Berber, but also some native, as it were, Castilian, a suitable accompaniment to the conversation between the two of them, which was not at all contemporary.
It was she who began, with a question: “What is your guilt?” (It remained unclear: emphasis on “your”? Emphasis on “guilt”?)—He, after a pause: laughs.—She: laughs, too.—He: “Explain high finance to me.” —She: “I find it uncanny, too, and increasingly so.—Will there be war?” —He: “I do not believe in war. A war is an impossibility in our story.—When will we taste the morning again together this way?”—She: “When the dog rose forms an arch at sunrise.”—He: “Look in a different direction with your crazy eyes; I do not want to cut off another fingertip.”—She: “Perhaps I will encounter my greatest male enemy today, and my greatest female enemy. That would be nice.”—He: “On the border between La Mancha and Andalusia they're still mining mercury, to separate gold and silver for coins from the lifeless rock.”—She: “That was once upon a time. And besides, there are no coins any longer. Look, a bird's nest in the drum of the cement mixer.”—He: “And do you remember what causes the sound down there in the gorge?”—She: “The pounding? It sounds like a giant hammer beating on a hard pad, but with something soft inserted between the hammer and the pad? The blows landing at regular intervals, four or five times a minute, and all night long, and all day long?” —He: “The drumming, the thumping, the stamping, the giant water-driven wooden hammer on a flywheel, the as-yet-undestroyed remnants of the long-gone tannery that used to exist at the bottom of the gorge, abandoned hundreds of years ago and hammering in the void when your predecessors, traveling on money business, passed through here on their way to the kings and the one and only emperor, whose realms without your loans would have fallen apart like grown-ups' playthings, which is what they really were behind the shield of gold and money, and correspondingly childish and deadly, and for you, their successor in the world of finance, equally or differently powerful, the tanning hammers, drive wheels, and fulling pads have continued working, without raw materials and without any product—except that in the meantime the pads sound as if they were the hides themselves—and as long as this rhythmic knocking and banging continues, I, too, would like to continue with my dicing, slicing, turning, shaking, and sprinkling from morn till night.”
And then, already on the way to the car, she looked back along the line formed by her shoulder (no one could sight along the shoulder as she
could, into the near and far distance at once), and said: “Listen, the footsteps in the gravel of the plateau. How the ground of every landscape one walks through produces its own unique sound—as here, in this old, drowsy, silently weathering residual area, the ever-thickening layers of soft, coarse-grained sand consisting of granite and mica, mixed with bits of rotted wood and plant stalks: a crunching so different from the gravel in any garden or cemetery you might think of; crunching? a sound without a name, new, like a new color.”—And here one of the roofers chimed in loudly from the almost completely repaired roof, understandable despite his foreign tongue: “Yes! Walking in the Berbers' sand makes a different sound. Absolutely not to be compared with the sound here. Not a sound—a tone!”—A mason spoke up, already dismantling the scaffold: “Yes, and walking through the mountain pastures below the Gran Sasso d'Italia: every blade of grass a taut guitar string, and every step—ah!”
And finally the carpenters, usually so silent, spoke up. Since their profession was seldom called upon, in this period they had become specialists in all sorts of auxiliary trades, and here at the hostel, after quickly accomplishing their main business, had also pruned the acacias for the innkeeper, repaired the rickshaw-like shopping tricycle, had ironed the tablecloths and napkins, and installed a satellite dish, with which their employer could bring in all the local stations from Alaska, the land of his persistent longing. And at the moment they were sitting in the back of their pickup truck, ready to depart, their legs dangling over the tailgate, and they said, “Back in the Balkans we walked only on limestone. And the limestone was porous and hardly made a sound. And certainly no tone. We hardly heard ourselves walking on the limestone there. Our steps were swallowed up by the lime subsoil. But our walking did become audible in the mud of the lowlands, from Voyvodina to the plain of Thessaloniki. One half of our Balkan lands consisted of this mud, the other of limestone. And back in the days when there was still work in the Balkans, we went from the limestone to the mud, and vice versa, and vice versa again.”
Finally—all the workmen were gone, but a brigade of sous-chefs and waiters was arriving, and the woman had just turned the key of the rough-terrain vehicle—the chef came running toward her, knife in hand, the point aimed at the ground, handed her a bundle of provisions, wrapped in white linen, through the window, and said (this, too, belonged to the dialogue): “Do not start eating this too soon. One's first hunger is not real
hunger.—In the books it used to say that one could not set out on an adventure without clean shirts and money and, in case of need, salves for the healing of wounds. And a long time ago you said you wished you could walk somewhere with me, out there—not for a hike, simply walking. And then you walked so fast that soon I could not keep up.”—And she: “Look—” What was it she said: “a wood pigeon”? “a flash of lightning”? “a polecat”? it was no longer audible; she was already driving away.
There was another recurring passage in the old books: “He” (the hero—why were they almost exclusively men, with a woman rating at most an intermezzo? why, for example, was there no detailed story of a woman to be read, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century?) “traveled on the road for many a mile without encountering anything worthy of telling.” And now, during the drive south toward the Sierra de Gredos, she encountered hardly anything that, according to the more or less established conventions or rules, would have been suitable for her story, which she did want to be thoroughly adventurous.
The sun shone. A still haze hovered over the unvaryingly bare and crumbly tableland. The poplars in the few riverside meadows, or
vegas
, or
lukas
, stood ramrod straight and leafless. The olive zone, where a harvest would have been under way, did not begin until the southern foothills of the Sierra. She rolled along, hers almost the only vehicle in her lane. Coming in the opposite direction, at close intervals, however, were mostly trucks, and each time the same model and the same color, bearing the name of one and the same firm, which apparently owned a huge fleet, all with seemingly identical mustachioed men sitting high behind the wheel, all without passengers; yet each accompanied by a dangling, rocking rosary, complete with dagger-shaped cross, in the front windshield, identical to that of the driver in front of him; one after another of these drivers in his cab raised his hand to greet her with the same gesture, each smiling at her with his eyes as a sign of comradeship but also friendly concern, wishing her all the best as he passed: as if she needed that.
And dangling in her windshield was always that same medallion with the white angel pointing rigidly out of the image toward the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ. And no one was walking along the side of the
road. And in the sky floated a single cloud that did not change during the entire trip. And no city came into view. And no fire burned in the thousand fields of the
meseta
, which with time came to represent a single field. And although during those hours nothing worthy of telling occurred, it seemed to my heroine as if one event were following the other, as if the happenings were coming hot on each other's heels and overlapping harmoniously with one another, as in a traditional story, yet also in a completely different way; as if the narration of her book were moving along all the more emphatically during this interim.
“I experienced spells of faintheartedness, something previously unknown to me,” she told the author later. “This faintheartedness—what a word—urged me to turn around and go home. One time I stopped the car and made a half-turn. And at that very moment I felt: my story was breaking off. And you know how it is with me: feeling myself being narrated—my be-all and end-all, my one and only standard. And I must endure that, I must. Not that I am addicted to danger: but danger is part of it, without danger, no story; without my story: I have not lived, I will not have lived. And so there was only one thing to do: press on. And then came the moment when I accepted the idea of never returning home. It was even all right with me. Inwardly I crossed a line and was ready.”—The author: “Ready for what?”—She: “Ready.” And for the time being she wanted to be alone as she continued her journey.
The only thing that occurred on this stretch: she filled her tank. Where a male hero seeking adventure would perhaps have grown grouchy and impatient, under the same circumstances she drew patience and lightheartedness from the absence of particular happenings; patience she would need for what lay ahead, of that she was certain.
Usually practically a race-car driver, she drove in a leisurely and steady fashion, and at the filling station—this, too, far from any city, along the deserted highway—she inserted a pause after each self-service operation. It suited her fine that the station owner, actually just a shopkeeper, came from his field behind the building, where he was plowing under the previous year's cornstalks with his tractor, and engaged her in a lengthy exchange about nothing of significance. She even dragged out the conversation, with if possible even more meaningless comments, such as, “Yes, and almost three months till Easter,” or: “Right: the cans of motor oil are heavy,” or: “Yes, soon summer will be here.”
And the conversation ended more or less this way:—The station owner: “Your husband back safe and sound from Africa?”—She: “Without a scratch on him.”—The station owner: “Your mother released from the hospital?”—She: “A week ago, still looking very pale.”—The station owner: “Your children still doing well in school?”—She: “The boy's been slacking off a bit lately.”—The station owner: “I remember how much I enjoyed watching you dance, Mahabba. And then your voice. No one in the whole area sang like you. You should not have given up your singing. Why did you give all that up after your wedding? stop dancing? stop singing? The softer the song, the more your voice went through and through me.”—She: “I will take it up again, perhaps not the dancing but the singing. What I need is a new song. I can feel it coming on. All that's there now are a few notes, a few words. What's missing is something to pull it together. Perhaps on the other side of the Sierra?”
She wished the station owner would go on speaking to her as this woman for whom he obviously mistook her. Or was he merely pretending to be confused?—All the better: she would drive off feeling easier in her mind. To let him go on and on about her in the role of that stranger; and if adding anything, doing so without asking questions of her own, or asking why, with no intention other than to get him to digress, again and again, every digression having as its focus the unknown woman, who in the meantime could equally well be her. As she left the filling station, the owner or farmer suddenly took her hand and kissed it. The benefit of an interlude, in which one allegedly wasted only one's own time, and time in general, and gained so much time. A rich interval. Bright trumpet blasts across the entire barren
meseta
.
Then nothing at all happened, and for a considerable length of time, once she was alone again with the road and the tableland. That for a while nothing at all happened: what an event these days—what a special circumstance. Nothing but repeated flashing of lightning. The flashes did not come out of the consistently clear blue sky; they came out of or lit up inside her. A flashing of images began inside her such as had never before erupted in such variety and such quick succession; like meteor showers, coming so thick and fast, yet often at distant points in a firmament which for that very reason seems impossible to encompass; the eye cannot keep up, yet does not want to let a single falling star go unnoticed. And again a curious phenomenon: that these image flashes were
generated by patience, and almost happiness—yet always pointed instead to something disheartening or even grievously sad.
In front of the car a whirl of chopped cornstalks, long since withered, blew along the
carretera
, whipped together by a wind spout into a sort of leafy column that spun past a few feet above the asphalt; and at the same time she, the driver, felt the brook flash through her, the brook called Satkula that circled the Sorbian village, more than a thousand miles away, in a great arc.
She put her finger to her forehead, which meant: be mindful. The image of the brook, the glittering of the water oppressive? First of all because she viewed any recollection of her childhood and its setting as over and done with. And then, that village signified to her falling prey to death. In her memory, the villagers there had been obsessed with death, day in, day out, including the children, or perhaps them above all, the children? Yes, the children's awareness, above all, at least there and at that time, had been riddled with village tales of people's dying, almost always gruesome, never peaceful, never? no, never. A neighbor had been tied up and his head stuck in an anthill, where the ants had eaten him alive (although it happened during the war, before her time, she had experienced it, as a child, as happening in the present). Another man broke his neck simply by falling to the ground while picking apples, and not even from high up on a ladder but simply from a chair (that could happen to them, the children, just as well). A neighbor woman choked to death simply because a horse whose smell she could not stand passed by. Another woman, so one heard, young and healthy, simply did not wake up one morning, and died, according to the priest at her open grave, in a state of sin, unmarried, with an unborn child in her womb. The miller—for a couple of years there was such a person there—lost the third and last of his children when the little one drowned in the brook, which was especially rapid below the dam, where the millrace joined it.
Perhaps it was less these accumulated deaths themselves than the tales of them circulating from dawn till dusk that populated the entire village for her, even in broad daylight, with terrifying ghosts; for all that was left of her own parents, of whose accidental death the villagers did not speak, at least not to her, the child, was trails of light, primarily due, no doubt, to her grandparents, who dwelt exclusively and insistently on stages of the parents' lives—and wasn't that characteristic of old folks? And any death in the village that she witnessed with her own eyes
affected her very differently from one described by a third party or, worse still, overheard in passing: the person, the neighbor, whose death, even the most wretched one, she experienced with her own eyes, present until the final breath, would never crouch on her chest at night or pluck out her heart and then jump out at her the next morning as she was on her way to school or in the afternoon as she drove the cows to pasture—for a while this was still done in the village, by some little girl or other, outfitted with a whip and rubber boots—from behind a barn, from the slippery rocks where one forded the brook, from an empty root cellar stinking of rotting turnips.
Yes, the innumerable tales of death and dying, or, more precisely, anecdotes, at times made her village seem toxic. Never again a village, or at least not that one. And in retrospect it seemed to her as if it had been chiefly that sense of being pursued by the villagers' obsession with corpses that had awakened her interest in money, when she was still a child. In money, simply the concept of it, she saw something that suggested an escape from the grim cycle of cadaver-worship, the hereafter, and apparitions. Money circulated toward life, embodied the living world, and meant
now!
(and now, and now …). And in the beginning it was just a healthy distraction. The thought of money gradually banished all the ghoulish stories.
And even then her urge to deal with money, to handle it on behalf of others, was far more powerful than the urge to have it for herself, to possess it; even then she had the idea (yes) not so much to multiply money as to let it be fruitful; to manage it—which then became the focus of her university studies—to use money to open new avenues, and still more new avenues, consistent with one of her later guiding principles: “He who steps into the same river has ever different waters flowing past him.” Setting things in motion with money: thus she became the first person from her death-obsessed village to go into the money business. (That she was a woman doing this was no longer particularly remarkable even then.)
And now she said, talking to herself sotto voce, as usual: “‘Thou shalt manage money!' is a commandment like ‘Thou shalt not steal!'; its positive counterpart, like ‘Thou shalt make it be fruitful and multiply!' And who knows, perhaps I accomplished as much as I did in this business because the thought of money enabled me to shake off those village death-and-doom stories? That thought gave me the energy to immerse myself completely, to my own and everyone's benefit, in the world of
the here-and-now, of life? But why are the village images coming to me now? Flow on without me, village brook!”
Another image flash: it pertained to the adolescent in the gatekeeper's lodge at the entrance to her estate. Like all the images that flew to her so unexpectedly, this, too, was thoroughly peaceful; was set in peacetime; generated peace—the image was peace itself. And at the same time the image-spark that lit up the boy, Vladimir, for her appeared, like that of the village brook, accompanied by, or primed or shot through with, a lack—something was missing, if not from the image itself, then all the more tangibly from the subject of the image, the person in the image, and dreadfully missing!
The boy was sitting, just as he had one time in reality, at the kitchen table in her house, not as an intruder but instead very matter-of-factly, as someone who belonged there. He was reading. The kitchen was clean, sunlit, and warm. The large wooden table was bare except for a bowl of quinces, yellow as only quinces can be. Peace? Silent contentment. And nevertheless she sensed, at the very moment the image passed through her, empathy, no, pity, for the actual distant figure there in the, in his and her, in their northwestern riverport city. It—it? a surge—drove her to him; or he was supposed to be here with her in this instant. That he was so distant—from her? from what might it be?—simply far away, separated, isolated—was her responsibility, struck her as her own omission, her (unspecified) guilt.
The image, along with its powerful calm, meant: she should be close to the boy, this other person. Contrary to appearances, this burly Vladimir, who passed her in her own space as if she were not there, was as much at risk of going under as any human being could be; the very personification of a need for attention. He was in danger of falling out of the picture, and she had to rush to his aid. (“I must,” and that smile of hers.) His parents alone would never be equal to the task, ever, and for anyone. (Her “sense of mission.”)

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