Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (44 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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These were lived in, were human habitations. It was the smoke from fires—wood smoke, root smoke—that we smelled all the way up here. Of course we knew from earlier crossings that down there in Hondareda, the most remote part of the Sierra, lived a hermit. But these people were no hermits anymore: so close together, and also so many crowded into one place. We had already noticed earlier, as we crossed the trackless wastes,
in addition to the innumerable footprints, the mussel shells amid the granite, in the sand and in the crevices.
We had even come upon oyster shells, gleaming with mother-of-pearl. And these could not be fossils, could they? There had been no ocean here, had there? And what hermits ate mussels and oysters? Had them delivered up here in the mountains? And the legions of shell-casings on the way up—in every tenth thicket a blue capsule (which one soon stopped mistaking for a glimpse of the sky on the other side)? Hermits who in the meantime were also hunters? Had mutated into hunters? And now also shots, from shotguns, again and again; in the forest down there?
The longer she stood and gazed down into this broad depression, so close to the summit plain (or the “cirque,”
circo
, as it is called in the area), the more contradictory the image became, less in the sense of off-putting than of attractive: contradictory? erratic, jumpy. Here in the trackless wilderness, to reach the colony below she had to strike out at random, clambering, jumping, also slithering down sandy slopes, then fight her way through, and on the opposite slope, up to the former pass, a real vehicular road in serpentines, this, too, not there on her previous visit to the Sierra, or overlooked. So was the Puerto de Candeleda in use again? even widened as never before, and likewise on the steep southern descent more or less passable, at least with an all-terrain vehicle? But this road leading so straight up to the bare horizon that one involuntarily thought: “Not suitable as an escape route.”
And in the midst of the chaos a helicopter landing pad, not built as such, but already there, a square of quartz and granite polished by the glacier, and a helicopter there just about to take off? no, that was merely the full-sized outline of one, with broad, blazing red stripes, in the middle of the square, intended to mark the destination for pilots heading for the depression. And there was a constant crack of shotguns, and at the same time, as she descended, from far below as well as from the slopes to the right and left of her, people were waving. From all sides dogs came racing toward her for a moment, each of them guarding a herd of sheep, goats, or calves, and they all jumped up on her at the same time and licked her from top to toe.
The shepherds, or whatever they were, who went with the dogs, without exception young and speaking into walkie-talkies, belonged to different and in every case quite mixed races, one with Asian eyes in an
American Indian face, another dark-skinned and red-haired, a third with the lips and forehead of an Australian aborigine, but tall and narrow-hipped, the next, a kerchief under her mannish hat, a girl with such a white skin and such black eyes that the two women, when they encountered each other, jumped backward for a moment, and all the young shepherds, not dressed in shepherd style, but positively elegant—which actually seemed even more practical and also appropriate to the
circo
of glassy, green, gray, blue-tinged rock walls—were intently focused on their work, the result of their not having been at it long—having started only yesterday or this morning. And as they carried out their “shepherdly” duties, they were also engaged in other activities, not only playing musical instruments, above all lutes,
oud
in Arabic, and steel harmonicas, whose brittle sound went well with the granite, but also juggling, walking on their hands, turning cartwheels on the edge of precipices, as if indeed practicing to perform in a circus, but also following the lines of a book with their fingers, rubbing flints together, tasting the mountain fruits, and many more such things.
How transformed these faces seemed, too, faces one might have encountered on a grand boulevard in Madrid or Rome, in the light of the high Sierra, in the broad-spectrum reflection that deepened and clarified the colors and lines of individual details, which the granite gallery encircling all of Hondareda, as well as the flat ledge underfoot, emitted; a light and refraction that showed the features of the faces not as isolated details, as mouth, nose, ears, but all in one.
“As a visage?” the author interrupted: “insofar as that word can still be used …”—She in reply: “At least for this book of ours you should describe less the mountains or the natural phenomena of the Sierra than the way the faces of people appear in the glow of the high Sierra!”
Not that the great depression, or basin, or bowl, below the uppermost rocky crest was thickly settled. And yet, on what was for now Ablaha's final crossing, it appeared to be full of people. And that impression did not stem merely from the fact that during her previous times up/down there in Hondareda not a soul had crossed her path, or at most one to three hermits.
Altogether, this place presented fundamentally different numerical conditions, or, to put it another way, perceptions of quantity. A scant dozen figures, moving about or merely expelling visible—at long last visible—puffs of breath in the otherwise motionless stony expanse at her feet, made the impression of being “numerous.”
Earlier she had received a similar impression from seeing the mountain goats in this high-altitude depression: even when it was only a single pair, grazing at a distance from one another, the peculiar nature of the location made it appear to her like a sizable flock. Or: whenever a pair of moths fluttered around each other, it looked like a whole swarm. Even the perception of space as one gazed down toward the floor of this supersized stadium, as well as around at the slopes or tiers, was unusual. The body of water at the bottom was at one moment a mere puddle, at the next a good-size lake. The dimensions of the lone building one encountered before the Puerto de Candeleda shifted between those of a vast mountain hotel, a half-collapsed little shelter, or a toolshed on the edge of the southerly access road (or was it nothing but a former glacial trough, full of light-colored scree?). And were those swaths of snow or trails of spilled flour?
She climbed down, down, down, for an hour? for two? for half a day? and yet had hardly come any closer to the first of the rock dwellings,
which had at first seemed no farther away than a hop, skip, and a jump, or an ibex's leap. Along with the confusing—confusing? no—numerical conditions in this Hondareda went measures of distance that at first seemed unconventional, then somewhat amusing, and finally familiar from long ago, becoming, the longer one was exposed to them, just as clear and self-explanatory as the commonly used meters, kilometers, miles, or, if you will, “leguas” or “versts.” As in earlier tales, she literally and figuratively—the path was heading downhill again, steeply—saw before her, after the treeless stretch, a dwarf conifer at a distance of “a stone's throw,” then only a “chamois's leap,” and then one member of the observation team, strangers to the area, at “crossbow-shot distance.”
A while later, she again had in her field of vision down below King Charles V / Emperor Charles I, or the man playing or replaying him, making his way without his litter and bearers, alone, hopping “over sticks and stones” with no sign of his gout, despite his almost sixty years, also with no signs of his king- or emperorship, his mouth open “as wide as a barn door,” as when he was a child and stood there “as if to catch Spanish flies,” at what distance from her? perhaps in “paper-airplane range.” And the abandoned litter tipped over among the broom branches, how far away? Approximately a “spear's toss,” no, “a bowshot” away. So does this make it a tale from an earlier time, too? No, from now (and now, and now).
The observer dispatched from the outside world to the new settlers' region of Hondareda—who had just jumped out of the barely landed helicopter down below, along with several others of his ilk—noted, however, in his later report that in fact it appeared that up here people had completely taken leave of the present, by even a few gloomy degrees more decisively than in Pedrada, halfway up; a regression was at work here that set them back not merely by decades but into the far-distant past, by centuries, perhaps millennia, actually an “atavism of an atavism.”
And his report bore the heading “The Has-Beens, or” (like contemporary headline-writers for newspapers and advertisements, he had a proclivity for verbal paradoxes and wordplay): “The Mountain Castaways.”
What was accurate in his report, or whatever his testymonial (pun!) was—which is not to say that it was “true”—was that the closer to the bottom of the depression, with its lake, the people there lived or “resided,” the more “down and out” they appeared. Observers, and not only the observation teams flown in, could not escape the impression that of
the mixtures and crosses of all the human races (if that word was still appropriate), the ugliest and most profoundly neglected, as well as most savagely, unsalvageably, and hopelessly battered representatives, individually or in pairs, had dragged themselves to this spot in the high Sierra and had tumbled headfirst into this enormous, rocky, prehistoric glacial pit.
Yes, that was correct: the figures in the settlement down there at the bottom corresponded to the image one had, although one should know better, of humans from prehistoric times. Were they even human beings like us, today, in the present? Did they even possess consciousness, a mental awareness as sharp and alert as ours, and our richly developed modern emotional life? Or wasn't the sight that met our eyes at the bottom of the depression actually something we had shaken off once and for all, a deposit, the “dregs”?—even the observer would probably have been appalled at such an expression?
Yet it was only from the threshold of the dwellings down there in the valley that the people of Hondareda appeared this way to her. (Yes, it was a valley, with meadows along the outflow of the lake, and a stretch of forest, although the trees were hardly as tall as a man, along one section of the lakeshore.)
Once she had arrived and entered the settlement down there, the people became recognizable as close relatives of the unmistakably contemporary young people she had seen all over the steep slopes: their parents? More likely their grandparents, and not old at all, as well as uncles and aunts, all of whom had something foster-parent-like about them.
And if the goings-on, the doings among those dwellings, did seem odd for this day and age—again the observer had observed accurately—and were not entirely up-to-date, this hardly indicated that they had “turned their back on the present.”
It must be conceded that along with, or in addition to, the unusual surface and spatial conditions in Hondareda, something like a different kind of time was in effect. Yet it did not prevail or hold sway, but rather accompanied and undergirded normal time, as a melody and a rhythm—like everywhere else, when a person did not know what time it was by the clock, the next person would know.
The presence of a secondary type of time simply came from the fact that with every few steps down into the granite basin one encountered a different microclimate, a wind that was wintry, then warmer and vernally
mild, then hot and summery, suddenly bitter cold again for a bit, until down at the bottom all these climate zones and winds were jumbled together.
And she acknowledged later that the reporter was right to some extent—when the two of them, since he, too, was out there all alone, crossed each other's paths at some unspecified time in the wilderness beyond his observation post, close to the Candeleda Pass, and fell into conversation: it was not completely inaccurate to call the Hondareda population the “has-beens.”
The very ambiguity of the term has something to recommend it. Didn't each of the new settlers remind one of an athlete whom an opposing player had sidelined once and for all, while this opponent had long since gone away, vanished, was no longer there to be challenged, continuing to play somewhere else? As if the has-been were not even benched but merely left shaking his fist impotently in the air?
But the inhabitants of Hondareda, as she urged the outside observer to consider at the end of her stay there, appeared to be has-beens even more, and infinitely more lastingly, in a different respect: as if of their own accord and free will they had decided, in rank and file (they who never lined up anywhere), not to play anymore, or at least not to play games in which one played, either openly or surreptitiously, primarily against another person or persons—not to play even a single one of those games known as “grown-up games.”
“So that means voluntarily renouncing all games with winners and losers, and certainly all games of annihilation? Forever? Such games are played out for good down in the pit?” (A playful question on the part of her partner in conversation.)
Her response: “Played out for the time being, in this period of transition, until perhaps, no, necessarily, a new and entirely different kind of play crops up. In this transitional period at least, your has-beens have decided to cultivate the greatest possible seriousness, each in his dealings with himself and likewise with his fellow settlers—which by no means manifests itself—why did you not see it that way as well?—in gravity but rather in a special gracefulness (‘Latinate words'). Where you may have observed, or rather
wanted
to observe, wild shaking of fists in the air, someone else might have noticed lunging and hopping steps, of a sort seen nowhere else, or maybe that peculiar clumsiness of someone
dedicated to total seriousness, but what a lovely clumsiness, not all that different from floating.”
A question from her opponent: “The clumsy seriousness of the has-beens and castaways, in which the rudiments and elements of a new form of play can be discerned?”
She: “That is right. Yes. To be discerned and ferreted out. And there is another way, a third way, to read your ‘has-beens': apparently they have lost all the images, ideas, ideals, rituals, dreams, laws, and, finally, also the first and last images that made it possible for them to picture a world, communal life on the planet, and prefigured it for them, prescribed it, lent it a rhythm, or perhaps merely feigned or conjured it up. And being stranded in this fashion is by no means voluntary. The loss of images is something that befell the people of Hondareda. The images, laws, rhythms, and so on that give the world meaning were violently destroyed for them, for each of them in his seemingly inherited place, by all sorts of external events—war, the death of loved ones, betrayal, crime, including crimes they committed themselves, and so on—generally at one blow.
“From one moment to the next, something ceased to mean anything at all to them: the image or the idea, for instance, that the Olympic flame is carried every four or however many years across the continents to the site of the next games, or the previously always valid rhythmic and predictable image of belonging to a country, a culture, even a people; or the images of Mars transmitted to Earth—and these are only the most harmless and tolerable losses of images. All the others—and the loss of images is total for those who found their way to Hondareda, or rather washed up there—are far more grave, infinitely more grave! A person stricken with such a loss can think only one thought: endgame! It is all up with me and with the world. Except that those who are affected, instead of drowning or hanging themselves or running amok against the rest of the world, have made their way here.
“To find a new image? Among this horde of castaways high in the mountains? To which you also belong? When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”
While she, the adventurer, and he, the transcontinental observer, were thus engaged in conversation, they were standing, by now on the other side of the meanwhile legendary “Great Depression of Hondareda,” on an almost glass-smooth granite outcropping in the midst of the mountain
wilderness, far from the colony down below, but also far from the newly graded Candeleda Pass road.
It was not unusual for her to deviate from the path on her crossing of the Sierra. For him, on the other hand, such a deviation was almost unheard of. This was the first time during his stay here that he had been thrust into an area devoid of human beings. At first he ventured only a few steps from the path, then a few more, and finally, without having made a conscious decision, he was already so far from his fellow observers that they, together with their top-volume communication and other devices, ended up out of his earshot, and even sooner out of his sight.
He was drawn more and more forcefully off the beaten track, and eventually he no longer hesitated to give in to the pull or undertow. He even hastened away from the others, no longer pulled but going of his own accord. And what did “off the beaten track” mean? How could a place to which he was going of his own accord, on his own recognizance, be off the beaten track?
And then, in what resembled the “eagle's solitude,” as the area through which he was walking felt to him, alone beneath the blue, nearly black sky—he had unexpectedly come upon this other human being. Even before he so much as registered that it was a woman, the woman, he realized that he and this other person were acquainted with each other, and not in a good way. In the place where they had met previously, the two of them, if not declared enemies, had crossed swords.
But how? And where? And when? The reporter—no, at this hour and in this part of the world he was no longer that, nor was he an “observer” anymore—could not for the life of him remember, and from the moment he first caught sight of the other person there in this remote area beyond Hondareda-Comarca, it no longer mattered. To his immense astonishment, the moment he became aware of a second person, obviously out there roaming around as freely as he was, something inside him took a great leap, a joyful one, toward this fellow walker: it did not matter now how she had once crossed swords with him!
That he then contained his joy, and in their exchange continued to play the observer's role, at least for a while, was another story—but it, too, no longer mattered to him, now that he was with this other person, who made him whole here in this half-lost condition.

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