Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (57 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And for a while she had been the guest of a former judge—as for her other hosts, she unobtrusively took over the household chores, or served
as a sort of barmaid—who among other things at one point wound up to offer more or less the following account: “In the thousands of years of recorded human history, we have already had one age of judges. It is supposed to have been a heroic era, a pioneering time, a time of preparation, the time before the age of kings and then of emperors. The people's judges were also the rulers or leaders, the generals, the administrators, and the high priests. But their chief title was that of judge.” As fate or chance would have it, at this moment the ex-judge's grandnephew or foster son stuck his head into the cave, which, as everywhere in H., grew increasingly grand the deeper one advanced into it, and asked, “Did you call me?” Her host said no, and continued: “And in my time out there and down below, it was an age of judges again, a different one, and with different judges. I myself come from a family of judges. All the men and then all the women in this family practiced the judge's profession, without much effort, simply following a tradition that had the force of law. But I wanted to have been the last in our family line! With me and through me we were to become extinct as judges. And so I have broken out of the family tradition, at least for the time being, and am no longer in office. Never again to judge, to hand down verdicts, to convict. Never again to base my entire existence on being a judge, and at the same time to destroy another's existence, or at least put it in jeopardy. For this second age of judges, as it was still in force down/out there until just a while ago, yes, or is still in force, was, as I know, for I was part of it, no return to that pioneering era but rather an age of terror, a new one and a new kind.
“The second age of judges was, or is, one of unlimited, arbitrary, and uncontrolled despotism, masquerading as an obligation to intervene in anything and everything—and a despotism no longer confined to individuals but all-inclusive. For anyone can claim to belong to the family of judges, and every man and every woman can cast, and casts, him- or herself with unequaled self-aggrandizement as the judge of everything and everyone, as the judge of the whole world. And these judges of the world want to be something that fortunately no one else wants to be anymore, or perhaps not? They want to be world rulers in their own way. And a result of that was, and is, that now none of the innumerable judges will himself tolerate being judged by the world.”
Again the boy poked his head in the door, but this time he said, “I knocked over the milk can”—whereupon his foster father replied, as if in jest, “An hour of detention in the cellar, without light, and for a month a
hard cot and lights on, you useless good-for-nothing!” and continued, “Anything but to be a judge again!
In my time
, that means the time now, after my time as a judge!” (And was not he the one who had proclaimed that stealing an apple from a stranger's tree should be viewed as daybreak in the middle of the day?)
For a while the abdicated queen of finance was also hosted by the likewise abdicated “king” and
“emperador.”
He was one of those in Hondareda who lived entirely alone, without grandchildren or other descendants. And it was not only because during her time as his guest she did the household chores for him in his “royal palace” or Palacio Real that the old man viewed her as if she had been the one who took him in when he was abandoned in the high steppe.
His palace was located in a cul-de-sac, part of the rocky chaos like the majority of the other buildings, though even more huddled, more crooked, and more like a hideout, and like the others who had found their way there, this Charles the Fifth or the First exuded the quiet sadness of a widower, and occasionally the delicate loneliness of an orphan.
Another factor in his case was that he was gravely ill and knew that he would die today or tomorrow, and up here in the high Sierra, not in the monastery of Yuste in the southern Piedmont, like the historical Charles. He had dragged himself, alone in the end, without his litter and bearers, up here and down into the pit of Hondareda, to end his days in this place, and that would occur in a manner entirely different from down near the plain—just the way he imagined his death, if it had to be now; wished it; wanted it.
Besides, he had had enough of kingship and emperorship, his own and in general. Over and done with, once and for all. What was it they said about kings? During their entire lives they had to be there for others and do nothing but listen from morn till night. And what had poor Louis the Sixteenth, on the evening before his beheading, impressed upon his son? A stern, bitter dictum: “Beware of being king!”
And yet this Carlos remained of two minds up to the hour of his death, or he was, as another of those apocryphal authors chimed in, “downright schizophrenic”: his abdication and also the general disappearance or disempowerment of kings struck him as perfectly fine—and a second age of kings, like the “second age of judges,” heaven forbid!—and, conversely, as he looked back on the life in society that he, split personality or not, imaginary king or not, had left behind when he set out for the
Sierra de Gredos, his own renunciation seemed a bit hasty, to say the least, as he saw before him, like a waking nightmare, the individual members of that society, in which meanwhile almost everyone had become his own king and self-appointed emperor, with ears for no one and nothing else, day in, day out, and if at one moment he was the soul of serenity and even wanted to lay his hands on his contemporaries, who had become so foreign to him, to perform the miracle of healing, in the next moment he wanted to curse them royally, as in bygone times. Wasn't he striving, after all, to regain his kingship? Yes, but more in the sense of a counter-king. He wanted to serve as a counter-king and a counter-emperor for his contemporaries.
Not until the day of his death was he in fact completely reconciled to what he had renounced. His being or playing at being king no longer mattered. The dream was over, and with it the split personality. He was simply the person he had been during his time there in Hondareda: the archivist, not in Simancas or some such place in the historical world, but for the new settlement—his cooking/living/sleeping hovel, with stacks, drawers, cupboards full of documentation, documentary stones, documentary plants, a concentrated memorial to everything that Hondareda would have been.
And at the end the abdicated king and emperor was also no longer an archivist but simply the dying man, with the Spanish flies around his mouth more numerous than ever, who muttered that he hoped he “hadn't spoiled the party for you”—what party?—and whose lips, after his death, still moved, in total silence, as if to continue speaking, and finally, for a long, long time, only the lower lip, that protruding lip characteristic of his royal line. And not until after his death did the sounds of pain he had suppressed all his life escape. Before that, he—with his soul already between his teeth—to her: “I regret only that I cannot read your, and my, story to the end.” Although he was letting himself die, he broke off several attempts. And when he finally succeeded, a child standing by his bedside clapped. Then a few adults standing around clapped as well. And toward the end they all applauded him, and how.
And she? had looked that day away from the man who had just died and gazed through the opening in the rock to the outside, which was not at all deathly still, or rather into the window slit in the back of the building next door, slightly off center, which let one see through a third house, and beyond that through the next of the little windows in the rock, and
thus through the house with the corpse to the next and the next and the next, all the way to the end of the row and on through the last of the windows and finally at a tiny yellow-gray-blue segment, all the more clearly in focus, of the granite surface that formed the summit plain of the Sierra, and against that backdrop the inhabitants bustling hither and yon, from dwelling to dwelling, or lounging, or reading, just as on a moving train one can look from a car up front, near the locomotive, back through all the other cars, and see the passengers from compartment to compartment to compartment, and behind the train the vanishing landscape.
Another of the transitional travelers, after he had beckoned her into his cottage, no doubt told her that the reason for his being here, if indeed there was a reason, was the light. Another: here at long last he did not understand a word, no longer had to hear his own language, its sounds and accent. And one person explained that he had left his country not because, as was often said, it was too limiting or insignificant or trivial, but actually the opposite, for at least to outward appearances, with its natural resources and especially its economic power, which gave rise to other forms of power, it had suddenly no longer been so limiting and insignificant, and then had become so powerful and finally even more powerful than in its glory days. And one person said he had set out for this region as a reader, as the reader of a long, long story that was set here in the Sierra, about a woman and her vanished lover.
And one day in Hondareda she also came upon her own would-be lover from the riverport city: as she now wanted it to be for her story, he had forgotten her, or had he? and he was thriving. And in the course of time she saw yet another person from home: the idiot of the outskirts—and the change of locale to the high Sierra seemed to have done him good likewise. His idiocy, which when expressed day in, day out, on the outskirts, with their identical curbs and the front lawns all mowed to exactly the same height, wore thin, flourished up here near the stratosphere, among the lichen-covered cliffs, got a second wind—was that expression still in use?—and adapted to the doings of the others.
And finally the story wanted the
andariega
to see in one of the new settlers her brother, recently released from prison, who she thought was in an entirely different country, committing his first act of violence directed not at things but at human beings, from which there would be no turning back.
And the person who appeared to her as her surviving brother—although outwardly there was little similarity to discover—or out of whom the supposedly lost brother spoke, said, as they shared an evening meal, at an hour unusually early for the Iberian Peninsula, in his living shed/storeroom /warehouse, approximately the following:
“I could already feel killing in my upper arms and my fingertips. Now! I said to myself one morning when I woke up lying next to yet another stranger, a woman who had called to me on the street the previous night as I was heading for yet another railroad station: ‘Wait for me!' The woman claimed to have known me for a long time. And my absence, to quote her verbatim, had lasted ‘for centuries.' How rough and at the same time tender her sex was. I had never encountered anything so rough yet so soft before. And as with all the other women, I never saw this stranger again. And with the passage of time I became her admirer. If you meet her, give her my best. I adore her. And I am sure she knows it, even if she will never hear me say it. And perhaps she will read in your story that we met not here and not there but in a third country that was at war.
“And I was in that country because of the war. I wanted to be in the war to take part in the killing. So there would be at least one less of these mindless and soulless two-legged creatures who are everywhere and nowhere nowadays, taking up space and even being paid handsomely for it! And that morning the moment had finally arrived! Off to clear the decks! And even though I was armed, I would do it with my bare hands, or with a stick—the whole combat zone was strewn with sticks and stones. And I would not kill an adversary or an enemy—I considered those of us on the two warring sides to be not enemies but woeful comrades in arms or whatever—but rather someone who was not directly involved, one of those bystanders who, as has become customary or fitting in wars in third countries, instead of trying to prevent war actually incite and whip it up, at the same time turning it into a business opportunity, or rather the sidewalk superintendents and kibitzers with whom the place was swarming.
“My grandfather was in the first world conflict and my father in the second, and both of them told me that it never crossed their minds to want to shoot at a so-called enemy, and to the very end they made a special effort to aim so as to miss. In contrast, however: death and destruction to those on both sides who had sent them off to fight one another and
turned the killing and dying into a spectacle—except that neither my grandfather nor my father ever had a chance to look these ‘devils' or ‘charlatans, ' as both of them called those responsible, in the eye or lay hands on them.
“On that day in my war I was assigned to a unit that was actually deployed to keep a fire-free zone open, secure a transit route, provide safe conduct. With a few others I was posted along a river in the mountains, at a ford where the road crossed the river at a shallow spot. At some point during the day, I saw, way off down the road on the other side of the river, a man walking alone, making his way through the bushes that had grown far into the travel lane since the war began. He was obviously not native to the area—although the civilian natives in the war zone had long since lost any native characteristics, by which I mean any sense of time and place, and were constantly mistaking yesterday for today, or for a day in the previous year, and constantly losing their way in their own village and even in their own house and grounds. No, that is not the one I am going to do away with, I thought, not yet. But the next one, from the Third Column, that of the sightless ones, in the armored personnel carriers with nineteen times nineteen banners waving!

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