Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (45 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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So what did matter to him? For instance, that she had fulfilled a wish of his, of which he had not even been aware earlier: the wish to meet,
in a remote place, as far as possible from the usual everyday and current happenings, someone he had once known all too well, or known in a bad sense, even in mortal enmity, appearing now as nothing more than a face, and thus to speak face-to-face as he had never spoken with anyone before; for instance, to experience in the flesh that the hostilities and dislikes of daily life were perhaps merely evil illusions, but all the more potent, despite being “neither conclusive nor inclusive” (his playful wording).
Mere wishful thinking? Yes. But how can one really object to wishful thinking? the observer asked himself, while he continued for the moment to play the role of the field researcher and reporter in his conversation with this former enemy, the lovely vagabond, or whatever she was, there on the glassy rock, surrounded by brush, scree, and ice: Hasn't precisely my unconscious wishful thinking become awareness and possibility, which means I can, I should, I may make it a reality, as is perhaps the case with no other way of thinking? I may? I should? It is up to me.
To be sure, and this was not to be denied, that first moment of catching sight of his adversary up here in this remote spot had also created an acute conflict: on the one hand, there was that leap of joy inside him toward the other person, kept secret until now but irrepressible—but on the rebound, no, simultaneously with that leap or reconciliatory urge, another impulse shot through the observer there in this alien Sierra territory—to clear that repellent figure out of the way—to kill her—destroy her—this was his chance!
And the other person, too, that was certain, had the same impulse in the first moment, was conflicted as he was: Jumping for joy or (a play on words) about to jump into a life-or-death duel?
And nonetheless, during that conversation on the stone outcropping, with both of them just playing at arguing, his amazement when in the part quoted above (“When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”) the mountain vagabond seized him, the official outside observer, by his ponytail—some of his colleagues on the team also wore their hair tied back this way—and hacked it off, lickety-split, with her pocketknife and tossed it into the stony waste.
And it is this action by which he recognizes the woman: she was the one who gave him a kick the previous evening, or a few weeks ago, or when had that been? Except that now this cutting of his hair is no hostile act. What is it? “A new ritual? A new image?” And in this spirit the two of
them will continue for a while to discuss the nature of images and the loss of images.
But we have not yet reached that point. One thing at a time—the episode or way station described just now was a case of our getting ahead of ourselves: first the story must deal more thoroughly with the wanderer and her encounter with the people in the pit of Hondareda up by the summit plain.
She stayed in Hondareda, as it turned out, longer than more or less planned, consistent with a favorite greeting in the colony: “Let it be a surprise!”
How long? For hours? days? Time played no part in these events, or at least not the usual part. Just as the customary categories of place and space continued to exist but hardly applied to what took place, the hours, minutes, seconds, and such were, if not inoperative, at least units of measurement best left out of consideration during this particular period, and whenever they nonetheless popped up in the story, they proved disruptive and unnecessarily sobering.
Time did continue to have an influence in this highest inhabited spot in the Sierra, but its units were less calibrated to, and measurable by, any clock rhythms from the outside world.
Entirely different units of time were in effect during the Hondareda episode, units lacking a beat, as it were, powerfully concentrated, condensed, and yet prolonged, oscillating and, for that reason, even without the usual tick-tock, by no means less regular, continuing on and on.
When normal clock times sneaked in among these temporal spaces so different from the ones we customarily traverse (“sneaked”? yes)—“for just a second,” “two minutes later,” etc.—they weakened the temporal magic, which, according to the reporter, was “in any case questionable,” but, in the view of the woman who had commissioned this story, reinforced the realness and the nowness and gave the story fresh impetus. In contrast to the measures of distance that had spontaneously come into use in the hollow, units of measure from long ago as well as newly minted ones—“a stone's throw away,” “at the distance of an ibex's leap,” “at telescopic distance,” etc.,—for the temporal units now in force no particular
terms offered themselves; for instance, not “in a dozing-off moment,” or “after a second dream-night,” for it was not a question of a dream.
At most they might refer to “a wind-gust later” or “after another hammer blow” or “before the next page-turning,” or use a now clichéd expression, which, however, had acquired meaning again in Hondareda time, “in a jiffy” or “after a while.”
The time in effect during her crossing of the valley perhaps revealed itself to be most clearly distinct from chronometricized standard time—yet no less normal or natural?—in that she, lingering along the way, also walking in a circle, as if getting lost on purpose, later described it to the author not with the usual “then … and then … and then … ,” but rather “and so on … and on … and on …”
In her eyes, a connection existed between those local time measurements, which eschewed any kind of precision, and the fact, “yes, the fact,” that the inhabitants of the Hondareda colony, in another regression? preferred to have their money, to the extent that any was in circulation among them, in the most archaic forms or incarnations possible, or in seemingly impossible shapes, such as lumps of rock crystal, or, preferably, sheets of mica, or, better still, clumps of droppings from the Sierra chamois, or, absolutely the best, hazelnuts—anyone who paid with empty shells was a counterfeiter!—and dried chestnuts, and the further fact that in the colony the units of weights and measures recognized the world over, the gram, hundredweight, ounce, pud, and ton, had not merely been eliminated but were also frowned upon, and this although the new settlers had arrived only recently and amid the confusion were busy setting up temporary housekeeping arrangements.
Anyone who slipped up and said that “in two hours” he had collected “ten liters of cranberries” or “twenty pounds of bovists in half an hour” or shot a “wild boar weighing half a ton” or had already harvested from his greenhouse “two hundredweight of potatoes, four bushels of barley, an ounce of tobacco, and eight grams of saffron” was punished with scorn.
In the depression, the only measures of quantity that counted—according to a law, unwritten, like all the others there (see “atavism”)—were ones such as “a handful,” “two palmsful,” “a bent armful,” “all pockets full,” “a back full,” and the like; although founded only a short time ago, the colony was already well stocked with customs and a sort of common law.
And the observer called this “simple and childish”; see currency transactions, see units of measure. He also asserted that Hondareda was
less a “colony” than a “camp,” self-imposed and voluntary, an arrogant one. She understood the man (without particularly acknowledging that he was right—which he also did not expect, for he assumed in any case that he was).
How strange at least the inmates of that high-altitude depression could appear when looked at in a certain way and from a certain angle. Weren't they in fact prisoners, of themselves or whomever, or refugees who had not adjusted to their refugee existence in the slightest; still acutely in flight with every step they took up here, where they were seemingly safe, or maybe not? So in contrast to their descendants, those young people up on the bright, rocky slopes, who had perhaps not been old enough to remember much of the flight, and crossed paths with the strange woman without suspicion, enjoying complete peace of mind, as she made her way to the settlement at the bottom, passing through the chaos boulders, the members of the older generations, who seemed to be in detention there, almost all shied away in alarm.
What had looked from a distance, from the valley's upper rim, like people waving to her: wasn't it rather a communal shooing-away, in unison, so to speak, of the intruder? The people of Hondareda recoiled, each in his own place, at the appearance of this unknown person among the inhabited blocks of stone, as from an enemy, who, having pursued them here from the place they had fled, was threatening their lives; the people of Hondareda existed in a permanent state of war, if not in their conscious minds or their unconscious, at least on the surface of their bodies, in their nerves, their skin, and their hair; and the enemy, even in the singular, like this woman now, had a crushing power advantage over them, just like the enemy from an earlier time and a great distance away; even when armed, all they could do when face-to-face with this enemy was cringe defenselessly and squeeze their eyes shut—pretend to be blind, as they had done from time immemorial, as if that made them invisible.
This is how the new arrival encountered the population of the hollow, though only at first, and briefly. A while later, a few eagles' circles, mountain jackdaw flocks' caws, under-ice chords from the half-frozen lake later, it became clear to her that a general and persistent recoiling, cringing, and shying away was typical of this place; not merely at the sight of her, or of outsiders (in the twinkling of an eye she was no longer viewed as such) but also at mere nothings—if the sudden shadow of a bird or a cloud overhead and an equally unexpected sound were nothings.
The noises in particular, also the most distant and tiny ones, which took on a ghostly, oversized presence down there in the huge stone amphitheater, leaping from cliff to cliff, exploding now on the left, now on the right, now in front, now in back of me, made me and the person next to me, my fellow hermit right around the corner, my neighbor in the next chaos-alley over, duck involuntarily or even throw myself flat on the ground or to one side.
The reporter commented that these behaviors stemmed from typical hearing damage, which affected not only the people in the Hondareda enclave but by now almost the entire earth's population: this phenomenon could be observed nowadays wherever civilization's noise no longer physically assailed people at its source but instead took on other forms, like phantom sounds, beyond the ordinary sounds, tones, and signals characteristic of civilization, and in these phantom forms jumped us from behind in precisely those places assumed to be isolated: in nature, in places without machines and devices and crowds, assaulting our organism more ruthlessly than the original racket in the inhabited hubs of our civilized planet.
“Take, for example, the solitary hiker, who thinks he has put behind him all the so-called curses of civilization, tramping, say, through a semidesert in Arizona or a full-fledged desert in Mongolia: a hissing of wind behind him, and he, his ears deceiving him, jumps to one side in confusion to avoid what he thinks is a horde of bicyclists descending on him—while at home on the city outskirts he would have calmly let real ones pedal past him. Then a chirping of crickets is heard all across the silent steppe, and he perceives it as the ticking of thousands of office clocks, more piercingly tormenting there than they ever were in his actual office. The softest bird's peeping in a briar bush—and he hears it as a telephone ringing, so harsh, so deadly to daydreams, and so hostile that he has hardly ever heard its like in reality.
“So we can observe precisely in the—admittedly peaceable—sectarians of Hondareda that there is no escaping our civilization—and why would there be? That it catches up with anyone who flees it—and only then, in catching up with him, as a phantom, becomes the actual evil that he earlier merely imagined!”
She, on the other hand, saw in the Hondarederos neither refugees from the world nor victims of civilization. Both as far as they were concerned personally, and in the name of the story to be told here: they were survivors. They—with the exception of the young ones—had all, each
alone and in his own way, crossed the valley of the shadow of death. They were all equally timid and tremulous, also those for whom the crossing had taken place quite long ago.
It was true that in their confrontations with strangers or even those with whom they had no connection, these people seemed reduced almost entirely to reactions or even naked reflexes. Yet in such reactions and reflexes, only the first and entirely superficial layer of the body or being of these survivors found expression. Below—behind?—beside? in the middle of? everywhere else, in body and soul, she, the interloper, sensed, as only in certain survivors, an enthusiasm, a joy in existence, and gratitude, if still concealed and not (yet) capable of being expressed freely.
How she sensed that? She herself was a survivor. And when their turn came, it took only a brief exchange of glances, after the initial head-tossing, for the “handful” of people down at the bottom of the valley, the core of the new settlers there, to recognize that she was one, too. And then they opened up to her, without further ado, though not collectively—Hondareda also lacked anything resembling a village square or any other sort of communal gathering place—but each one individually; each in his hideaway, which appeared to turn its back on his neighbor's, and was also seemingly as different from it as possible, on purpose.
And did they expect her to open up to them as well? Until the departure of the strange woman, “a considerable time,” “a moon,” several moons, later, no one among the inhabitants of the Sierra summit-plain valley knew who she was. For the first time on her journey she went unrecognized. But there was nothing left to recognize, not the queen of finance, or the film star, or anyone else, given how she had been making her way across the land and the continent for so long now, without a profession, without status, without a role.
They did not want to know anything about her, either; no name, no family, no previous life, no loved ones, no mother or father tongue, no land of origin, no destination—each person's dealings with her took place as if in the absence of all feeling—and rightly so—rightly so? “The only thing the various individuals of this strange tribe lacking all tribal organization” (the reporter's expression), of this “tribe of hermits” (ibid.), and all of them, wanted to ask of the beautiful stranger, “whose beauty meant nothing to this neoprimeval horde” (ibid.), and the very first thing they said after coming to trust her, their fellow in experience, each in his own idiom, different from that of the person next door, was: Which route had
she taken through the Sierra de Gredos, to bring her up here / down here to Hondareda—which, among them, was absolutely not to be called “Hondareda,” but rather, exclusively, and each time with a different pronunciation, “the Pleasant Plantation.”
She had then omitted not a single detail in her recounting of the journey; in particular the deviations and detours aroused enthusiasm in listener after listener, or, to use another term, their solidarity, and so from way station to way station she invented more and more details for them. How gullible these “planters in stony acres” (the observer) were when it came to anything that involved storytelling—all that was needed was the appropriate wind-up, the sentence structure, the tone of voice, and the rhythm, and each of them was all ears, and their lips parted in astonishment—even when the contents offered nothing at all to be astonished at. (“What do you consider human?” she asked the author, and his reply: “To ask you the right questions and in that way get you to tell stories.” In that way? Yes. And here his use of the intimate form of “you” was just right.)
This was how she also discovered that her listeners, like her, the storyteller, were survivors in a particular sense. Was she, who had once, quite emotionlessly, made major decisions affecting banks and the money market, also gullible? Yes, and always had been, since her village childhood. “You could tell her anything!” (“Me, too!”—the author's exclamation.)
Beyond storytelling, however, when it came to other utterances and events: just as among the people in this place—if not a villager's caginess, certainly a fundamental skepticism (“basic,” the author's suggestion); a probing and testing, or an insuperable incredulity, impervious to the most logical argument.

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