Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (28 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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“Before the bomber appeared, when only its roar was to be heard, whatever was in motion in the sky or on the ground had fled. Everything scattered; or seemed to scatter. A hare dashed off in a zigzag, followed in a straight line by a herd of wild boar. The falcons scattered, or rather swooped off in all directions—a provision for actual fleeing clearly not part of their natural endowment? Even the clouds and billows of fog taking flight.”
She continued her narrative: “Yet that was only an isolated incident, a colorless one, seemingly bleached-out, among thousands of colorful ones during our bus trip. That we were constantly biting our lips during the meal was actually caused by the cold. As far back as childhood, on particularly cold days, time and again we had unintentionally and painfully sunk our teeth into our frost-swollen lower lips, even drawing blood. In the ruins of the inn up there at the top of the long since abandoned pass,
everything tasted delicious. Even if that same morning we had eaten an apple or a chunk of the very kind of juniper-cured ham that was in the crate of provisions, we thought: How long it's been since we ate an apple. We've never tasted the difference between mountain and lowland nuts so distinctly.
“And it is not only the person who first came up with the wheel but also the person who first combined ham and juniper berries who deserves to be called an inventor. We consumed with gusto even foods we had hated up to then, as I had hated pickled mushrooms.”—“Perhaps also because you were all entertaining the thought that this might be your last meal?” (The author.)—She: “No. If we felt in danger, it was the same as every day, there for a moment and then gone again; and sometimes for another moment, and so on.”—The author: “Why do you constantly use the first person plural in your narrative? ‘We, we, and we'? Even when it's only ‘I'?”—His client: “To keep us together. To keep us us! To keep me only me is not right, at least not for this book of ours!”
And then she fell silent. She closed her eyes. Her eyes remained closed for a while. She said nothing, just breathed, deeply. When she finally opened her eyes: a blacker black than usual, unblinking, the pupils pulsing evenly. Then she said: “In earlier times quite a few people had the ability to summon to the inside of their eyelids the residual image of a place, weeks or months later. But what I was seeing just now was not an image of us bus passengers during our rest stop by the ruins, but rather writing, lines that ran both from left to right and from right to left.” And turning her head away and gazing to one side along the line of her shoulder, she ordered her hired writer: “I want you to take this over! Take it over from me, author, more freely. Let it emerge. Let it acquire its own shape.”
Then to the north a group of people on foot came into view, and among them the litter with the gout-plagued abdicated emperor was carried past the
venta
and over the pass. The annual reenactment of the final journey of Charles V, which had taken place almost half a millennium earlier, over the Sierra de Gredos and down to its southern slopes, to Jarandilla de la Vera and to the final stage of his life in the Yuste monastery? Four young fellows, familiar with the area, in summery clothes, some of them barefoot, carried the old man on poles over their shoulders. Yet Emperador Carlos was not really that old—“about my age when I was hired by the banking queen to write the book” (the author)—, and was actually peering like a child from his litter, or perhaps like someone about to die, on the way to his place of burial.
As during all the years when the woman and the emperor had held meetings, she was bringing him a chest full of money, transported on a horse-drawn cart and now hauled up by her entourage (far more numerous than that of her business partner), but this time it was simply meant as a gift, no longer for financing one of his dozen or two wars and for paying his army of mercenaries scattered throughout war-torn Europe, and farther afield in North Africa, in South America. But the abdicated emperor, the dying man, merely waved it away; did not want the money; did not even wish to see it.
All he wanted or wished for was that she might let herself be carried in his litter, by his side, for a few paces, until just over the top of the pass; which was then done. There was ample room for both of them, and the bearers actually seemed to find the double load, that of the winter emperor and the winter queen, lighter, far, far lighter, and not only because after the long climb the road finally leveled out and then headed
downhill. They almost ran, dancing and skipping, and the man marked for death, face-to-face with his unfamiliar-familiar friend-foe, bit his lip; but unlike the bus passengers in the previous episode, did so voluntarily.
A trained falcon perched on the emperor's forearm, on the ermine sleeve of his robe; so much smaller than its mountain relatives wheeling in the air above, and looking not at all bird-of-prey-like or avid of the chase, but just as greatly in need of help and childlike in its beseeching manner as its litter-borne master. A flock of ravens, black as only ravens can be, caught up with the group, not cawing or screeching, but bawling, as if from one throat and one body, in bloodthirsty rage and murderous lust; and again the pinkish-white almond blossoms wafted past the solid raven-feather cloud now dispersed in all directions: against the sky-darkening raven blackness, spots of brightness never before seen in this way.
And among the innumerable colorless water droplets on the blades of grass, where was that one bronze-colored one from yesterday, or whenever, near Tordesillas, or wherever? There it was, at the feet of my adventurer, as she squatted in the circle of her traveling companions in the ruined inn, even if it was not melted hoarfrost as before, but a drop of melting snow, and instead of on a blade of grass on a folio volume poking out of the debris on the ground: a tiny but glowing bronze lamp just a bit above the earth, no larger than the head of a pin and all the more blinding, at least for a moment, just as, at night, also for moments, a single glowworm can be.
In a corner of the wall, overlooked until then, the wheel of a barouche, it, too, having followed her here from elsewhere, along with its tried-and-true twelve spokes, counted at one glance—but from where? from the hurricane-lashed garden behind her house in the riverport city, or from elsewhere. And on the interior walls of the ruin, inscriptions, familiar from long ago, even those in Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, one or another of which she had already deciphered, again effortlessly and without any specific intention of reading them: “Here begins the land of the swine—death to the swine-eaters” (
al chinzir
, “the swine”), and: “Here ends the elephant kingdom and begins the donkey kingdom.”
One of the travelers found in the rubble an old, or perhaps not so old, wanted poster, as large as a movie advertisement: a search had been under way, or was still under way, for a band of bank and armored-car robbers; and the likeness of the only woman on the poster resembled her so much that for a while some of the travelers kept glancing back and forth
between the photo and her; the children even pointed at her, and, as they did whenever they thought something was afoot, whatever it might be, waved and clapped.
For a while the entire group held their breath, then breathed all the more deeply; an audible puffing and expelling of air, pushing air out of the deepest recesses of the lungs, as if in a game; the clouds of breath thicker and whiter than ever before, eddying from the throats and floating away from each traveler's mouth into the surrounding area and, entirely unlike the fire-spewing of dragons, marking the contours of all objects in their path, the rounded notches in the oak leaves, the half-buried folio pages, the snowflakes floating past the faces—how sharp their crystalline forms became in the expelled breath—the intermittent rays of the sun, the bundles of rays distinct enough to touch, like writing emerging from a plain background. And in the mountain air, the features of this person or that in the group took on sharp outlines from this playful blowing at one another from filled lungs, outlines at once alien and familiar: no mistake, no confusion of identity—I know you. The hissing and crackling of the fire in the open-air stove matched the general puffing and rattling expulsion of breath. Now someone or other was already opening his mouth to speak to someone else; then hesitated after all.
After a while the driver will have given the signal to resume the journey, swinging a hand bell, a rusty one that still clanged, also found in the rubble, from the inventory of the inn that had once stood there. The travelers will have risen from their squatting position. The children are promptly seated in the back of the bus. The driver's son, whose head comes up only to the hips of the adults, has punched them in the stomach, an additional signal for departure. With some he also had to take a running leap to get at them; and that included the women as well as the men. Finally, for her, a particularly energetic, remarkably powerful blow, below the belt, for which he hurled himself at her.
She acted as if nothing were amiss; as if she did not even notice. As was so often the case, she continued eating, whereas all the others had long since finished their meal; she had postponed starting, as usual; had first sampled with her eyes and then eaten with provocative slowness; left not a shred, not a crumb; savored every morsel, as she now did the flakes, the kernels, even the bits of membrane in the cracked nut, until there was nothing left; let the aftertaste of every molecule linger on her tongue, not allowing herself to be disturbed or hurried.
The others had all been sitting in the Sierra bus for more than a while, some of them already asleep, others with their eyes closed, when she finally joined them. She simply had her own sense of time, and, when circumstances warranted, this sense also had to prevail over the people around her, who had always tacitly accepted being ruled by her casual attitude toward time; even bowed to it willingly and often full of curiosity and anticipation. Thus the passengers now sat there in the bus as if something were about to be offered to them; as if they were about to witness a special performance. Even the driver and his son waited in patient suspense, their dialogue interrupted.
Upon her joining them, the engine of the completely silent vehicle started up; and for the moment it sounded as if there were several engines. A blast on the horn rather like the steam whistle of an old paddleboat, halfway into the mountains, and now they were rolling along the old pass, on a road out of use since peace had come to the region, since the civil war, that is, heading down to where this road merged into the so-called new road, no longer all that new; enveloped all the way to the merge in a cloud of dust that matched the name of this intermediate stage of the bus trip, “Polvereda.”
They drove along for a while without any noteworthy events. If there was a village somewhere in the Polvereda region, hidden behind the lower ridges that accompanied the
carretera
and gradually closed in on it, no road sign pointed to one. The stretch of road they were traveling had no side roads branching off, and if there happened to be any, they soon ended at a mountain pasture, where, however, no cows or sheep or any other animals were standing, only here and there a solitary raven, no longer molting. The name “Polvereda” was still appropriate once they left the hard asphalt road; for, at even the slightest breath of wind, plumes of dust rose here and there and formed narrow funnels, swirling into the air.
They rode for a while beneath a sky where, whatever looks might suggest, no airplane had ever appeared, or Leonardo da Vinci's flying man either. No jet contrails way up high; and if a cloud occasionally could be mistaken for one, none of the passengers made the association; not one of them saw anything other than a cloud. And no trucks came toward them. No electric poles. No pasture surrounded by wire fences; instead interlaced fieldstones, branches, and broom twigs. The colorful scraps in the bushes were not paper or plastic but cloth, fleeces, also skins.
The only vehicle approaching from the other direction: a bus in which not a soul was sitting but the driver, who, contrary to custom, did not wave to his colleague; also no engine sound, as if this other bus were rolling down this steep stretch of road with the engine off, coasting. And not a soul outside, except the hiker, the one from earlier, from some past era, still walking along the shoulder, with his knapsack, his pack, from which dangled, no, not a camera and binoculars but a mason's hammer, chisel, square, and compasses, the latter two made of wood, monumental in size: the stopping of the bus, on her, the adventurer's, command. The itinerant mason had then not climbed aboard the bus—had peremptorily waved the travelers on, without stopping or even raising his head. His gait, with long strides and arms swinging rhythmically, his hair fluttering behind, his sleeves and trousers flapping and whipping like sails, his tools—or
hadatt
, as she thought, not “tools”—bouncing around him, circling and swinging like the gondolas on a carousel: and all this happening for just the second—again she did not think “second” but
thania
—of the bus's stopping and opening its door. And the hiker in close-up, chewing, as he walked, on a raisin,
zabiba
in Arabic.
Ah, to get off the bus and go on foot, too; to walk like this stonemason, or whatever he was; to place one's feet like him in the footsteps, deeply imprinted in the natural gravel along the roadside, of one who had passed that way before, which—and these, too, as also became clear in that one moment of the bus's stopping—not those of a human being but rather of an animal, a hoofed animal, not a horse but an animal with smaller, more delicate hooves, evidently a long-legged one; ah, to stride through these seemingly oceanic spaces between mountain ranges with as much verve as that figure already disappearing in the distance; with ever new horizons or frames of vision; horizons entirely different from those visible from the vehicle, even if they were the same ones, stimulating appetite, creating desire, touching one's lips, breast, and belly, even when, and precisely when, they were still a day's journey away; even if the horizons were an illusion.
The bus drove for a long time through the Polvereda, from time immemorial a far-flung region of sand and dust clouds at the foot of the Sierra. Now and then little clouds and wisps of wood dust even came puffing out of the bark of the ancient trees, more and more isolated from one another. Almost all of these trees had broken crowns. Was it possible
that the hurricane that had struck the riverport city, back home in the northwest, had also swept through these southern mountains? No, this destruction had occurred long ago. Furthermore, these beheaded trees displayed streaks of soot, although not all the way up the trunks (which would have indicated a forest fire), but only at the points of breakage or beheading; and unlike that of a lightning strike, the damage had come not from the top but from the side, had swept through horizontally, had split the trees' necks without leaving traces of fire, the soot mark looking like a black ruff placed around the headless neck as it stuck up into midair.
It had been neither lightning nor storms nor forest fires. No, these trees, so crippled that they were no longer recognizable as oaks, birches, or mountain acacias, often not even as living things (they might just as well have been the ruins of pile dwellings or telephone poles), had been shot in two, and if not with full-sized rockets, then certainly not with mere pistol and rifle bullets either (these had turned every single road and advertising sign into a sieve, such that the holes, if one took the time to look at them, formed their own unique symbols, words, and outlines of images).
Here in the Polvereda region a battle had taken place; even, over the centuries, several battles; and the most recent one could have been fought a week ago or a dozen years ago already—the destruction seemed at first sight a thing of the distant past, but at second sight as if it had just now swept across the landscape with a single massive karate chop—the splintered wood so white, the fibers so fresh and marrow-moist.
And in old tales and books, this Polvereda here, this dust-cloud region, had already been mentioned as a perpetual theater of war. One of those old stories, however, suggested that this region, the
comarca
, the marches, merely presented travelers with phantom images of war and battles (see “dust clouds”). In that book, the Polvereda figures as a generator of hallucinations for any stranger; and since the region has always been largely uninhabited, it is almost only strangers who find their way there. The Polvereda as the “enchantress turned to dust,” “the deceiver”: and it deceives people also with respect to time: the stranger who goes astray and sees those mysterious dust clouds, now here, now there, experiences even things from the distant past, things that have become the stuff of legend, as very much of the present, all the more terrifying and unexpected.

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