Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (54 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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All their internal games and dances consist of these avoiding and skirting and countering motions, a balancing of contradictions: and in addition to recaptured composure, they give them fresh strength and a new outlook, contribute to conversions: of tiredness into alertness, of timid recoiling into calm gazing around, of getting out of the way into discovery of new ways, of getting lost into finding one's way to some other destination entirely. These are transformative games and dances that produce a reversal, growing precisely out of failures and false starts. One could thus, with more justification, characterize the dancers of Hondareda as “transformers” than as scientists, engineers, planters, animal husbandmen, bakers, shoemakers, shepherds, hunters, gatherers (yes, really), readers, writers, technicians, carpenters, breadwinners, gardeners, merchants.
They transform the bustle in the streets and town squares—after all, up here in the mountains they are not out of this world—into a dance of haste: by slowing down inwardly, not outwardly, they transform slavish haste into briskness. And they accomplish all those actions and operations that are otherwise inevitably accompanied by annoying sounds and noise either by merging the sounds into a sequence, like relaxing dance music, or, when the person nearby, a grandson, a neighbor, a person entrusted to them, is sleeping or ill, by becoming quieter and quieter in their
actions, a special art, which, entirely unlike a disturbing complete absence of noise, fans the person sleeping or sick in bed in the next room or next building with relief and rocks him to sleep. A dance and a ballet like this quieting dance is something you, my observer, have never seen, and you will never see it anywhere else, and you will not see it here anymore, because with my departure it will no longer be here to be seen.
And you, my Herr Cox or Jakob Lebel, you reporters sent here from elsewhere, suspect these players and dancers of the internal world of being the evil enemies, the mortal enemies, of those who sent you on this mission, and therefore also your enemies. And the chief reason for your suspicion: the contrariness among the new settlers here, culminating in their relationship to numbers and, a critical element in the remote-controlled furor against the new settlers, above all their relationship to time.
And it is true: you outsiders have a way of experiencing and measuring time that strikes the Hondarederos as harmful to reality. Not that they would have the temerity to throw myths at you and charge that in your attitude toward time you are repeating the murder of the first of the gods, the god of time, progenitor of all the other gods. But they do accuse you—and see you in turn as their enemies—of stripping time of its reality, humiliating and desecrating it, with your way of measuring, dividing, manhandling it; instead of letting time play an active role in life, actually enlivening life, time as the life of life, even if one does not see anything supernatural or divine in it.
They are aware, of course, that they do not stand a chance against you and your kind of time, and therefore they will never foment a war against you, contrary to what one hears. Instead they sometimes—though very seldom—feud with one another, to the point of hurling insults and even beating each other up, which occurs when one of them uses your sense of time in conversation with a neighbor: “It was a year and three days ago that I moved here and began a new life.”—Don't say that! “Those lovely minutes four and a half months ago on the peak of Almanzor.” —Be still, you blasphemer, you are committing a sin against time!
Not that the people of Hondareda have no calendars and clocks. They have the most modern clocks here—and use these time-counters and measuring devices wherever they are useful, in the workshop, the laboratory, the studio, in the wine, cider, or olive cellar. Such things are abhorred, in the sense of being proscribed and banned from the entire
settlement area, only outside of normal, or mechanical, arithmetic, practical time. The many curses directed at the prevailing time here: in the form of deep sighs.
The time that is supposed to come into play now is by no means each person's subjective, emotive, internal time. Yet time as experienced by me, you, my neighbors, by all of us neighbors, is supposed to contribute to the project of a different time system, one that would have nothing to do with calculation—a system in which time, instead of merely ticking to count things off and count them out, would commence to dance, as the friend of life—a dance like all the dances in the Hondareda region: internal, momentary yet also more lasting in its effects.
A project? Yes, a new form of time like this would have been the Grand Project, invisibly inscribed here on the horizons, in which all the new settlers' fragmentary basic impulses—a new form of time must be found for you, for me, for him, for us, for them—could have come together. New verb tenses, time-grammars, a new way of thinking and speaking of time: accompanying existence, yes, escorting our being, illuminating it, lighting the way for it.
To date, however, tentative efforts at best have been made, and today every Hondaredero is left to his own devices in his attempt to achieve the grander time in concert with his neighbors, and all of these efforts are again negative dances, in sentence form: “Not like this! Not like this! and also not like this way of thinking and speaking of your time here on earth!”
Hasn't every individual in the depression of Hondareda cursed himself over and over, also scratched his own face and bitten his hands, whenever he has contemplated his life, past, present, and future, and found that the numbers and norms of clock and calendrical time have converted what had been lived, was being lived, and would be lived into a mere calculation of before, now, and later; rendered even the most piquant of life's images flat and tasteless; stripped memory's richness and potency of its reality and value; covered the precious Now! with rust; and metronomically deprived the longing for day or night of its body and soul.
“Not to destroy my experience yet again by adding the thought that I met my first and last love nineteen years ago; that today, at my departure, it is eleven o'clock on the second of February.”
But did not my, your, and our story demand and require for its completion that we add the notion of a time element? Yes, with the mental addition of a time element, the “three minutes” last night and the
“microseconds” this morning would be transformed into the continuity that historians otherwise attribute only to centuries or millennia. What kind of time should we thus think of in conjunction with our life, our story—for here, in Hondareda at least, every person can think: “My life! My story! I exist!” Who else can say that?
So, what tenses? what images of time? what time-styles and time-rhythms, time-signs, time-words, or also merely temporal arabesques, should be added to our existence to make it shine forth beyond the boundaries of our existence and life?—And that, in a rough outline, would have been the time-reconceptualization project up here, for which, however, from the beginning it was no longer, or not yet, the time.
I know, too, observer, that for once you would agree with me, if here, on this granite outcropping under the mottled black high Sierra sky, I were to say to you that the Hondareda region is particularly suited for outlining and integrating forms and sequences of time that are less wedded to numbers.
Even just the stratospheric sky here—and not only on those nights when there seems to be not a single patch of sky without stars, and when the most distant and closest planets' orbits are crossing, with the sparkling of their innumerable reflections in the mica, quartz, and alabaster at your feet: a different universal time from the one posted elsewhere in airports, banks, and also here and there in the remaining no-man's-lands.
And this region is also favorable for the construction, yes, construction, of a new sense of time free of the compulsion to count, favorable precisely because of the “chaos” created and left behind by the giant glacier, the granite boulders, towers, arches, and outcroppings scattered over the broad bottom of the basin where the settlers live. It is true: all over the earth there are no longer distinct seasons for blossoming, ripening, and lying fallow. But down there in the summit-plain depression, this constant shifting of the seasons is particularly noticeable. And what is also true: those who have migrated here have helped the effect along through technical measures. But summer and winter, fall and spring, are also all mixed up naturally, with abrupt switches from windy to windless in the rocky chaos, from sunny to cloudy; it can be freezing cold in the cavernous alleys, yet hardly a step farther on, without the actual presence of the sun, merely from the heat radiating from the granite boulders standing, leaning, and lying there in a favorable spot, shone on previously by the sun: a warmth tangible like the warmth that sometimes wafts over
one from a field of grain, or the warmth that streams from ears of corn being shucked, even in late fall—a silo warmth, no, an oven warmth, a broody warmth. And similar conditions in the lake in the chaos, where the ankle-freezing still water suddenly gives way to smoothing, caressing warm currents, followed by almost scalding whirlpools.
And this is true as well: at present one can observe everywhere in the world that fruit-bearing plants in particular often bloom several times a year and produce fruit all year round, even in wintertime. Whether it be elderberries, rose hips, or strawberries: next to the dark-black, heavy, sweetly ripe bunches of elderberries, in fall or summer you have surely noticed, against a barn wall, at a crossroads, by an electric pylon, April-like cream-colored clusters of bloom or still unopened buds.
And the mountainous regions are even more favorable to this magical transformation of one season into another. And the village of Hondareda, with this chaos that does not merely create blockages or obstructions but also has a dynamic or propelling effect, enhances this phenomenon, acting like a glass bell in some places and spaces, independent of the seasons. The budding, blooming, fruit-setting, greening, darkening, and ripening, the shriveling and wilting of an elderberry cluster can be seen all at the same time on the bushes.
Thus Hondareda-Comarca is both the natural glacial chaos as well as a protected enclosure, used as such by the settlers and unobtrusively enlarged by them, sheltered from the surrounding mountain wastes, and if exposed, then primarily to the stratosphere above: perhaps more related to it than exposed.
All of this could have provided fertile ground for the time-economy project. At least there were some points of departure in the speaking style and sayings of Hondareda, which seemed extremely odd when one first heard them.
Thus a verb tense in current usage again was one that had disappeared almost everywhere else, the pre- or postfuture or future perfect tense: “We will have met each other. We will have exchanged clothing.” Or we often used the equally archaic prepositional phrase “at the time of”: “at the time of our evening meal,” “at the time of his life,” “at the time of your absence,” and we used this phrase more frequently than “with,” “before,” “after,” and “during,” and also in bizarre expressions such as “at blackberry time,” “at book time,” “at brother time,” “at grain-of-rice time,”
“at the time of your lips,” “at night-wind time,” “at our deal-making time,” “at apple time,” “at grass-blowing time.”
Yet for the most part the project remained limited to this: in our thinking and speaking, our action and inaction, we rejected, often filled with anger at ourselves, the bad forms of time that had a destructive effect on being.
It was even more beautiful then, and an even more powerful reality, when, as happened all too rarely, one became aware of a time more in tune with existence, and one could finally give “time” full play as a noun: “sand-between-the-streetcar-tracks-time,” “sky-in-the-treetops-time,” “night-blindness-time,” “Orion-and-Pleiades-time,” “eye-color-time,” “steppe-roaming-time,” “baby-carriage-pushing-time,” “Death-and-the-Maiden-time,” “crumple-letters-in-the-fire-time.”
Time beyond counting and measuring? Yes, and also, in an expression found in the book that accompanied me on my journey, my vanished child's Arabic anthology: time “beyond weighing.” Away with those ugly standard times that anger us, and distort reality—and bring on the uplifting, inspiring time beyond weighing.
Does this mean that the immigrants to the mountains despise numbers and figures? On the contrary: they worshipped numbers for their imperviousness to all dodges and tricks.
And naturally—in the sense of a law of nature—the group of new settlers in Hondareda must have aroused worldwide indignation with this new time-management plan?, no, time-management initiative, like a dangerous sect?, no, even more passionate indignation than the most notorious sect, engaged in abducting children, emptying bank accounts, and practicing human sacrifice. And yet those who sent you and the others here, my dear observer, will not even step forward to oppose the impending attack, intervention, or whatever up here in the Sierra de Gredos. They see nothing wrong with it. They also have nothing against the people here, and when they assert that, they are almost pure of heart.
They think nothing at all when the intervention, as they say without lying, “forces itself” on them. What will happen up here is completely independent of their thinking, their decisions, their will, their person. As far as they are concerned, and this is believable, the Hondarederos are not their enemies. That the Hondareda enclave must be wiped off the face of the earth has nothing to do with two different worldviews, economic
systems, concepts of morality and aesthetics, but rather with the laws of nature. Hondareda must be eliminated simply on the basis of the laws of physics. Motion produces countermotion. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.

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