Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (22 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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“It is uncertain whether the many mutations among the plants in the Zone can be traced back to the gardeners' constant spraying with toxic chemicals, etc.: what was clear, at any rate, was that the stinging nettles that still sprang up vigorously here and there, in spite of everything, no longer stung—yet some of them stung all the more savagely: one of the increasingly cruel perfidiousnesses of the Zone's gardeners, who had mutated along with the plants—just as during that period the Zone's
sparrows more and more mutated into vultures, and the small black ants into termites (overnight all that was left of the Zone's parliament was its façade. But even before the building was gobbled up it had become a mere stage set).”
The conclusion drawn by our would-be archivist followed: “In light of all this, one could ask oneself whether these very conditions in the Zone might not give rise to a longing for another world, for entirely different possibilities, or any possibility at all. Except that there was no other world or possibility anywhere.” (So the person drawing this conclusion did not consider such a longing worthy of even a question mark?) “On the contrary, one of the influential books of the time, entitled
The New Candide
, argued that the conditions prevailing in the Zone were the best of all possible worlds!” Yet didn't precisely the crowding, the large number of inhabitants of Nuevo Bazar, argue for the opposite? How can one imagine forming such a large number? Imagine? Image? For shame!
Back to my woman from the northwestern riverport city. In contrast to her hired author in his village in La Mancha, she had no objection to the tendencies manifested by that would-be historian from whom we have heard in the interim. For during that night in Nuevo Bazar, a night as bright as day, she found his seemingly groundless assertions confirmed in some fundamental respects.
It was true that almost everyone on the streets strode along as his own king, and also expected anyone he encountered to make the appropriate obeisance. And because each individual used his personal sense of time to tyrannize over the person in whose company he happened to be, repeatedly the apparently peaceful bustle would experience from one moment to the next an audible and visible jolt: shouting, screaming, hitting, violence (which would then subside just as suddenly); among the faces that looked so similar, and so balanced, wherever one went there would be one, two, or several that in the twinkling of an eye could turn into grotesque masks, with teeth bared, tongues lolling or stuck out, and the well-tempered, almost overly civilized voices—which everywhere, even among the older children, could easily be mistaken in intonation and pacing for the sonorous tones of radio and television announcers—after an abrupt catching of the breath were transformed into the screeching, growling, and hissing of apes? hyenas? beasts of prey?, no, of human beings turning savage, with a savagery utterly different from the putative primeval variety.
And immediately afterward—the grimaces and howling suppressed and silenced with such uncanny rapidity that the bared teeth and screeching seemed to have been a chimera—the earlier monolithic equanimity and radio-announcer sonorousness restored; except that now one increasingly
suspected general pretense, masquerade, and playacting; as if it were already Carnival time here in Nuevo Bazar; except that each person, following his self-declared time-reckoning, was making his way to his very own celebration; intent upon appearing as the particular historical figure and assuming the particular role that had been reserved for him since birth.
Then she, too, felt almost infected by the constant oscillation between sonorous magic, shrill unmasking, remasking, and growing suspicion. She also noticed that the longer she stayed in Nuevo Bazar, the more she herself regarded people, and hence also the smallest phenomena, with suspicion, even at a distance and with gun cocked, as it were, no, not merely as it were. And she realized that suspicion and the proliferating mix-ups in the Zone went hand in hand—although in her case without the terrible consequences so common there.
“Mix-ups?”—“Yes, at first I mistook the heartbeat in my ear,” she told the author later, “—not surprisingly, after a long day of driving alone—for someone pounding on a steel door or the rumbling of a wrecking ball. But that was all. Or I more and more often mistook the books that quite a few people had in their hands for dog leashes. Or when someone raised his cane, I saw it as a gun pointed at me—except that I did not immediately pull my own trigger, as is said to have happened more than once in Nuevo Bazar.
“What continued to haunt me: the suspicion that every phenomenon in that place had been tampered with—and the sense of irreality. That became most clear to me at the time, at the time? when I, who usually derive my perceptions of real shapes and colors from a kind of tasting, tried to recall the evening meal I had eaten at the hostel: I simply could not remember what I had eaten there barely an hour or two earlier, and in particular I had not the slightest aftertaste.
“But,” she continued, “unlike the Zone historian's, my gaze did not remain fixated. Or I used whatever I was fixated on as a point of departure. I willed it that way, for my story.”—The author: “Is that something a person can will?”—She: “Yes, it can be willed and resolved. I willed and resolved to push off from my fixations, and by means of them, and that came to pass. And thus it was that there, in the so-called Zone, I found my way back into my story and our book.
“That
historiador
and those who consider themselves his successors or disciples, the whole tribe of ‘friends of history,' with their cultural
continuity: all well and good. Yet our book has an even greater continuity as its subject, which should not preclude—on the contrary—the narration of equally brief, even the very briefest, moments, and the inclusion of various things that verge on dreams—though only verge—, in which time leaps, or is suspended, or piles up, becoming concentrated and even dense enough to touch, as occasionally happens in a Western; remember
The Searchers
, when the family waits in silence, alone on the prairie, for the Indians' attack and for death; and the compressed time in
Rio Bravo
, where all night long the trumpet of death is played for the group under siege in the jail, and in the end it feels as though not just one night has passed but an epic year, an epically compressed eternity.
“Your task is to describe not cultural continuity but the grander time, and it cannot happen, it is simply not permissible, for the future to appear as an impossibility, as is the case with the Zone archivist.”—The author: “Please accept my thanks for this lecture. But in my previous life as a writer have I not done quite a bit, or tried to, to develop a sense of this grander, or also merely different, time, and to make it strong enough to bear the weight of this long story and that, and this and this, and another and yet another?”—The woman from the riverport city: “What do you think induced me to select you, of all people, to write this particular book? Idiot.”—The author: “But why a man for this assignment? Wouldn't a woman be more suitable, and also more appropriate to the spirit of the times, as the teller of your adventures?”—She: “Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling, whether a man or a woman tells the story. The minute you begin to tell a story, you are neither a man nor a woman anymore, but simply the storyteller, or, better still, you are the pure embodiment of storytelling. And by the way: be more sparing in your use of ‘so to speak' and ‘as it were.'” —The author: “And should I assume that when someone's story is told it does not matter whether the subject is a man or a woman?”
The riverport woman: “No, no, no. Our book must be about my story, a woman's story if ever there was one.”—The author: “In what respect, for instance?”—She, gazing along the line of her shoulder to the distant horizon on that side: “To begin with, simply by virtue of telling a long story, a very long story, perhaps longer than all your previous ones. If a story is to be told about me, and in general, about a woman, it must be a long, long, long story—and something other than a woman's novel or a chronicle of life at court. If suited to our times, then something of this sort. And simultaneously, my, and our, story should run counter to our
age, as is appropriate for a book, or is it not?, should circumvent it, transcend it, subvert it, no? And by the way, be more sparing in your use of ‘for instance': it is obvious that every detail in our book suggests an example, no?”—The author: “A story as long as
Gone with the Wind
? And about a woman in finance, whose image as a woman is distorted or even destroyed by the image of money?”—The woman from the riverport city: “For all I care, equally long, or almost as long, or half as long—even that would be something—as
Gone with the Wind
, but in other respects with no resemblance to it. Or perhaps not, after all?”
And she continued to gaze along her shoulder, and said, after a long pause, “And besides, I have nothing to do with financial matters anymore. I am, so to speak, no longer a banking princess, as it were. I have changed professions.”—The author: “Since when?”—She: “Since last night. An eternity ago. Since my crossing of the Sierra de Gredos. Since the evening, night, and morning in the Zone of Nuevo Bazar.” And she gazed along the line of her shoulder, which swiveled gently as she did so, toward the far-off horizon, now at her back, and fell into a silence that lasted for some time and became more profound with every breath, eventually giving way to something like a pulsing, and gradually drawing in the author.
She had moved through Nuevo Bazar as if along a diagonal or the line formed by a cross section. The images she encountered, also in her pushing-off from the established “track” (the word supplied by the Zone archivist), with the omnipresent images of shopping, organized events, happenings, and other stimuli in the foreground (and in N.B. these foregrounds predominated), prevented even one of those images from poking her, images that, according to her conviction, represented and refreshed the world for her and for everyone, and were the main point of her book.
But that did not matter now. First of all, it had been her experience that in any case those world-conjuring images, whether here in Nuevo Bazar or at home in the riverport city, did not show up in the evening. They belonged to the morning; were part of the morning; brought with them and brought about what made the morning the real morning.
And besides, she had always trusted sleep and the revitalization it could be expected to bring. Nor did it disturb her that the glimpses through the few gaps, actually mere cracks, into the background of the settlement revealed images of desolation, of despair, or of sheer nonsense; that just kept her more awake. From the beginning to the end of the diagonal line, there was no building on the right or the left whose
ground floor did not have a shop window. These shop windows usually took up the width of the entire ground floor, and often the entire façade as well, from the street level up to the top floor, the fifth, sixth, seventh. Quite a few of the façades had no front doors, suggesting that the rooms behind them, from bottom to top, were merely display spaces? Next to them almost identical shops, all just as brightly illuminated, the wares laid out in exactly the same way, except that automatic doors let one enter and buy, the stores still open at this late hour, the clerks lit up like statues and as motionless as the solitary mannequins in the neighboring buildings. Each showcase façade showing only one type of item, from bottom to top, but in multiples, masses of them, so that next to one display with thousands of fur coats came another with equally many suitcases, and next to that, one with ten thousand wall clocks, and so forth.
The sensation of moving between two stationary railroad trains, with multiple decks entirely of glass, or are the trains gradually beginning to move after all?; the sensation further reinforced by the music, which remains the same from car to car, from the six hundred thirteen garden chairs stacked up in one, to the three thousand four hundred bicycles symmetrically arranged on stands up to the roof in the next, and the thirty thousand wine bottles in yet another.
And the gaps and backgrounds in this cross section: What is going on with them? They exist, though perhaps not every time in the literal sense. One of the stores, depots, showcase buildings, annexes, although as glaringly lit as all the others, is empty, white walls without shelves; not a clothes hanger nor carton nor even thumbtack to be seen, not merely cleared out and awaiting a new shipment, also not newly erected and therefore standing empty until the following day or the following week, but empty this way for a long time already, and for the duration, yet in its emptiness, even without a sign, or the name of a company, or a street number, in business, like the other stores along the diagonal, or at least ready to go into business.
For first of all there is the usual automatic glass door, opening and inviting even someone passing at a distance to enter; and then in the background (yes, background) of this store that has always been empty, one person, obviously the manager, in a three-piece suit and tie, on a chair, low and extremely narrow, at a very small but immaculately polished table, on which he has placed both hands, his fingers extended, spread wide, his nails rounded and manicured as only a salesman's or businessman's would
be, while he sits there very erect, keeping his eye on the door—in contrast to the clerks in the neighboring compartments (most of them constantly talking to each other, some of them apparently distracted)—the epitome of presence of mind, without a trace of an item for sale, without a catalogue, without a computer, without a telephone, without paper and pencil, without toothpicks, without a Jew's harp, without an ammunition belt.
Another such gap and background is formed when, for a change, the stores along the diagonal of Nuevo Bazar are not constructed in an unbroken line but leave between them a crack to slip into, not large enough to slip through—for that there is not enough room. In one of these very rare niches one's eye then encounters, as elsewhere the metal shopping carts that have been left standing, pushed away, allowed to crash into each other, similarly overturned baby carriages, which seem to have careened off course, a pile of similarly rusted lower and upper frames, the fabric long since gone, the wheels sticking up, as if these conveyances, like the pushcarts, had been merely borrowed (and simply left standing after use, or shoved out of the way).
And yet another background image of this sort came from the duplicate posters pasted on every display window, photos or artists' renderings of children and adolescents who had gone missing here in the Zone—there were dozens of these posters—and dozens upon dozens of the equally many wanted terrorists: and since the children had often been missing for so long that their photos had been altered to make them recognizable at an older age, and, conversely, because often the only available portraits of the long-sought perpetrators of violence were from their youth, the posters, which all had the same size and the same format, resembled each other to the point of being indistinguishable.

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