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Authors: Peter Handke

Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (59 page)

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And like the heroine of a nineteenth-century English novel, for example, she would have taken refuge that second night in a hole in the ground, surrounded by so-called fairy circles of mushrooms, to her mind always the most uncanny of plants, enormous, black-gilled mushrooms that glowed in the dark and beamed their disgusting odor of decay at her in the middle of the circle, their giant umbrellas having the form of black suns. And there was lightning and thunder. And an avalanche—in the southern gullies of the Sierra it was early spring, with a constant danger of avalanches, especially when the mild winds blew from the south—roared by so close to her that she felt its draft for a long time, like an ice-cold spray on her flushed face.
And that one zone in the stretch of forest that had had a fire, where she had constantly stumbled over nothing but dead birds, all the cadavers close together, as if they had been blown there, the hawk with the mountain titmouse, the sparrow with the eagle, the wren with the sparrow hawk or hawk, and in all cases only their bare bodies—what had happened to their feathers? And that scene in a storm, as she cowered in a sheltering niche under a rock shelf, and little by little a fox, a viper, a scorpion, a salamander, a family of wild boars, a snow-white weasel, and even more animals that were otherwise mortal enemies by nature, had gradually joined her, and how they had all waited quietly and peaceably for the storm to pass. And one time, as she slept in a sitting position, the blow on the back of her neck.
None of this happened during her descent from the Sierra de Gredos, or perhaps some of it did, after all, but under different circumstances, in a different light, and especially in a very different rhythm. She encountered drama at every step, whether walking, standing, or lying, but not of the cheap variety sketched out here.
Accordingly, on that first night, in the first stretch of forest, a jungle-like tangle, she saw a fire flaring up in the pitch-darkness, though well contained in a circle of upended stones, and in fact she did come upon a solitary person, the only one during this phase of her journey, a nocturnal Jew's harp player. And she asked him whether he wasn't afraid, of what? of other people in this unsafe time and area, whereupon he—was this the rape?—looked at her with burning eyes and replied that he was never afraid, for “I love human beings” (yet the author, when she repeated this,
word for word, so that he could write it down, looked at her as if in dismay; as if such a thing, both as a fact and as a statement, had long since become impossible and unthinkable; dismayed? disarmed?). The hermit had exuded a strong smell; he smelled of having gone astray.
And during the second night, as the
asendereada
was crouching somewhere, she in fact, almost literally, had her head knocked off. Yet the blow came from her own head, which, as she nodded off from exhaustion, struck her chest with practically lethal force: “One could have died of it, as if executed by the weight of one's own head.” And it was also true that she lay in a ferny hollow for almost a day, “more dead than alive,” but without the “poisonous toads” that “crawled over her”—but what did this mean? wasn't this a way of being truly alive for a change?
How it came about that she then lay dying, as it were—no, leave out the “as it were”—and without anyone else's doing, that was, or so it seemed, exciting enough to the author and reader caught up in the story—and exciting in a way that annoyed him less than those many stories that were written, and even more often filmed, as if “excitement” were the be-all and end-all—as if it were required nowadays that all books and films be exciting.
Even the steep southern face of the Sierra was punctuated by granite ribs, rock spouts, and ledges, poking up amid the fallen rock and scree. As the woman passed them on her way down, for a while she was still so preoccupied with the settlement of Hondareda that she was repeatedly tempted to knock on one of the rock piles and step through a doorway as into one of the dwellings carved out of the former glacial trough. Except that these were no delicate chaos-rocks resembling houses or inhabited towers. For here on the southern flank there had never been a glacier. The topography was too steep for a gradual flow of ice. And where the author's client had initially, just past the crest, wanted to push open the door to what she thought was a stone dwelling, the rocky ruins—not as rounded and polished as those of Hondareda—came from a peak that had gradually crumbled in some prehistoric era: parts had sheared off one after the other and hurtled into the depths, over the course of ten thousand or a hundred thousand solar years—until finally all that was left of the former mountain, at one time perhaps just as pointed and almost as high as the Almanzor, was the flat, slightly jagged rump, today's ridge, the crossing point. The largest and heaviest pieces of that former mountain had fallen almost halfway to the valley, and stuck out in the middle of the steep
slopes, in the form of spurs, onto which one stepped on the way down from the Sierra as onto an almost horizontal platform, easy to walk on and seemingly intended as resting places—whereupon one suddenly found oneself on the edge of a vertical rock wall, falling off into a veritable abyss, not a good idea to scramble down, at least not during the night.
Time and again she knew she must turn back there—still that smile upon turning back? her smile glowing in the dark? and go slightly uphill again, until she finally ignored the spurs and the smoother stretches they seemed to offer, and in fact all apparent shortcuts. Better to stick to the reliable step-by-step serpentines through the trackless scree. She had everything she needed. She even felt increasingly enriched, “in the sense of being showered with presents,” as she described it. In contrast to all her previous crossings of the Sierra, where the moments of fulfillment—the sense of experiencing the entire possible range of existence, body and soul—had been pierced almost immediately with the pain of guilt at being farther than ever, infinitely far, from love and her loved ones, this time she did not see herself as alone, and at one point said out loud into the night: “I can do nothing better for you than to keep on doing what I am doing. In doing that, in doing it in rhythm, in a conscientious rhythm, without sloppiness, finding my own rhythm and getting it to vibrate, oscillate, and show the way, I am doing for myself and for you the best I can do, for myself and you.”—“What do you mean by rhythm?” (the author chiming in here).—She: “Intensification of what is already there.”
And as she walked, climbed, and scrambled, there appeared to her for a moment, as briefly as a single snowflake flitting by before the real snow came, the old nursery in her house on the outskirts of the northwestern two-river city, lying there silent in dim light, where the toys lined up on the floor for a game were suddenly illuminated, then gone just as suddenly.
That must have occurred at approximately the spot where the
asendereada
left the treeless, and also almost vegetationless, high-altitude precinct of the Gredos massif and began threading her way past the first Sierra pines, all of which along the edge of the woods were denuded, stripped of their bark and their tops by lightning. A lone star above one of the split crowns: an accessory, an essential one. But contrary to her supposition, it was not one of the stars forming the forehead of Orion, the central winter constellation. Indeed, there was no more Orion to be seen anywhere in the entire vast sky. Also no more Pleiades. No more Castor
and Pollux. Not a single winter constellation left. No more winter? So that is how long we have been traveling together. A good long time. A swath of time. A wave of time. A hedgehog's snout of time. A plane tree's notched leaf of time. A bomb crater of time. And now, too, an expression from the Arabic book, this also flaring up like a snowflake or a falling star: “And the breath of the Merciful One wafted in from Yemen.”
And now something squishy beneath the hiker's sole, a sinking into something soft: a piece of a garment? an entire garment? a garment shrouding a decomposing corpse, stretched out there on the forest floor, already half transformed into a cadaver, gelatinized?
No, the softness came only from the fabric and the thick moss growing all over it. And the fabric? Was, and is, that shawl or stole we had lost during the previous crossing of the Sierra de Gredos, a year or five years ago, and had been determined to find this time. Is such a thing possible? Yes, it is possible. “And we will not lose you a second time, my shawl!” she said, as she involuntarily traced the word “shawl” in Arabic letters in the night air (it was the same word).
She walked. We played. And our playscapes extended far beyond the four walls of your nursery, farther and farther beyond. At every step a playground, a playing field, a play space, and one followed the other; followed on its heels; went hand in hand with it.
And this succession of spaces also presented itself as a succession of settings—for what? what was set there? what happened there?: where the spaces themselves were the happening, the game, the spectacle. And the places through which she was walking alone now formed trails and fords and passageways and walkways and tunnels to the locales, the same ones or others, of once-upon-a-time: where we two—did Arabic, like the Slavic languages, have a dual form, between singular and plural?—had been at one time, or had passed through: every few steps, these places in the Sierra turned out to be augmented by settings from her childhood village, from her school and university towns, from megalo- and metropolises, but more often by settings off the beaten track, remote places where she had once been with another person, or with several people who had become close friends, and at the same time will have been—this is how clearly the places, sites, and spots of the past that were played into her hand presented themselves.
And each of these once and future settings, here and there (she demanded that the author avoid the term “place images” or even “image” for this stage of their joint story and use it only at the end, if at all), revealed a pivot and a hinge, a connecting element that allowed it to pass into the following setting, to continue turning the stage and the page to the next.
Wasn't this whirl of settings, from her own life and others', contemporary ones and ones from hundreds of years ago, predestined for this section of her route and as if planned in advance for her book? Perhaps;
but if so, not such a rapid whirl: with time less whirling than swirling like a meteorite and crossing its own path. And remarkable, too, that it happened as she was walking downhill, instead of uphill, as had been her previous experience, and at night instead of in the morning.
A setting that came flying to her was the kitchen where her half-grown daughter, after they had located each other again (before she lost the child for the second time), was playing hostess, serving her (that had never happened before between mother and daughter and would never happen again in this way?) in that house by the Atlantic cliff near the small island town with the name “Los Llanos de Aridane”: yes, each setting and everything in the series passed before her, together with the terms for it, as the-signified-and-its-signifier.
And almost with the same step there came flying to her the edge of a square in another small town (“Where, when, in the ring-around-the-rosy of places, names from now on are unimportant for our story,” she told the author), where the two of them again, the woman and child, had eaten at the end of a market day, and all that had happened was that they had sat there together in the otherwise emptied-out marketplace and that a strong wind will have been blowing, making the empty fruit and vegetable crates left behind from the market skitter all over the square, and that scraps of paper and plastic will have swirled around their heads, and that the sky above the square was, and is, and will have been pale gray.
And with the next step, the two of them—in the dual,
mi dva
or some such—are driving home in the car on a rainy night, and all that happened was that during the entire trip tools, hammers, axes, pliers, together with apples or whatever, rolled back and forth on the floor of the car, and knocked against each other, and that the shadows of the raindrops on the windshield, whenever they were struck by the headlights of an oncoming car, dart across their clothes and faces in the form of dark, round spots, and that it is warm inside the vehicle.
And a building that had once been a schoolhouse had a triangular gable with a relief in the middle representing an empty circle. And from a harvested cornfield far from the Sorbian-Arab village, a waterspout (an archaic term?) swept the chaff up above eye level and across the abandoned field in a column. And a caisson pulled far ahead of us along a cemetery's main avenue, and the autumn leaves drift down around it. And on the railroad embankment the tall grass appeared and then was gone and out of sight, as it blew in the direction we and the train were traveling. And
the hedgehog appears, the one that got stuck in the fence and that we will have freed. And now that swing appears on a certain playground in the dusk, still swinging without the swinger, who has disappeared, and then it will have continued to be pushed by nothing but the wind.
And with yet another step she saw in a flash the mouth of one of the rivers where it meets the other in the riverport city, with its sandbanks and the northern sky mirrored white in the water, one of the rivers black like the río Negro, the other blue and yellow like the Amazon, and the waterfowl from all the world's rivers swarming there at the mouth. And with the following step she saw in a flash the shriveled onions sending out green shoots in the cellar of the bombed-out house. And with the following step there flew to her the neatly set table at the foot of the cliff. And with the following step, the fire seen through the little mica window in the door of the stove. And with the following, the sobbing from the telephone (which thus also became a setting).
At last she reached a patch of woods where it was no longer merely dark but in fact pitch-dark. No, “pitch-dark” was not the word either, or “pitch-black,” for even with the juniper branch, which she held out in front of her like a blind person and tapped on the ground, she could not make any headway. Yet the moonless starry sky remained just as clear as before. The trees simply formed such a dense canopy between her and the sky that although a faint sparkle penetrated, it did not light her way even a thumb's length ahead. What was that expression from the Sorbian-Arab village?—“a darkness you can hang an ax on.”
One could not see one's hand before one's face? That was how it was. True, it would not have prevented her from pressing on. So why did she finally stop in her tracks? Because she no longer knew whether she would still have solid ground beneath her feet; because not another step was possible. To feel her way forward with her hands was still possible; but impossible to do that at the same time with her toes and soles. Another village expression came to mind: “no farther than a hen's step.”
For a while she tried shuffling along, without raising a foot. And could one make headway like this? Each step covered hardly half a span, and in the end perhaps just barely a toenail's length. On this night there would be no finding her way out of this forest. And where she now stopped, total darkness reigned, without a glimmer, without any outlines, a darkness such as she had encountered only underground and in a tunnel. Since
this was the case, and nothing to be done, she sat down to wait for morning.
She did not have a flashlight on her, but she did have matches. Where she was crouching, she could feel brush under her fingertips and could have made a fire like the Jew's harp player and lover of humanity much higher up in the Sierra. (Higher? She had been going downhill and uphill so constantly that the two of them were probably at the same elevation, but separated by ridges and yet more ridges?) But she preferred to remain in this unparalleled darkness, at the same time under an open, cloudless sky. She also did not want anyone down in the lowlands or elsewhere to see her fire and think she needed help.
Did she need help? No. She stretched out, on her back. Even once her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, the earth and the world around her remained invisible; not a thing could be made out in the light of a star here or there, no leaf, no cluster of needles; what could be made out was only the darkness—but it could be made out after all—which took on shape, became a form, provided companionship. A bit earlier she had been walking along a brook at the bottom of a gorge that turned out to have no outlet, and thus for a while she had had to go uphill again, winding back and forth: from the water far below now barely a distant rushing. Otherwise, all around her not a sound to be heard.
Not the slightest wind was blowing now, either. All night long, no breeze. Neither cold nor warm, no breath of coolness or mildness. In the total darkness the air stood still, could not even be felt as an element. Occasionally, astonishment that one had no trouble breathing. Involuntary sitting up and leaning back—was this a tree? Yes, it was, and to judge by the pattern of its bark, an oak. That meant one had already covered half the distance, from the heights above the tree line and through the belt of conifers. I have hardly ever seen this woman lean on anything, certainly not on a person. And now she sat on the bare ground and leaned back, and how.
Then there were noises after all, sporadic ones, at intervals, and always the same: something hitting the forest floor, small yet very hard and heavy, after falling from a considerable height. And these were acorns, and they fell all night long, now farther away, now very close to her, now on the right, now on the left, now up on the mountain, now toward the valley. Was fall already around the corner, then? No, she had experienced
just such a falling of acorns before, during a very different night spent out of doors, in a different part of the world. And during that Sierra night she heard it again inside her, and thus it deserved its moment in her story.
The falling acorns, for all their distinct clinking, clanging, and eventually veritable “cymbaling,” produced mysterious sounds like those otherwise made by a single leaf or twig in a barely perceptible wind. At first they were joined by the last airplanes, at great altitudes, on the threshold of audibility, the planes on long-distance flights to overseas destinations, having taken off around midnight. Then came the night after midnight, and nothing but the tinkling of the acorns and the acorn xylophone, more and more also an acorn vibraphone; yes, the darkness vibrated with the sound of falling acorns.
For a time she dug into her provisions: “How groping for something to eat enhanced its taste—the greatly intensified quintessential bitterness of the rowanberries!” For a while also mere lying and resting. For a while sitting and taking notes, for me. What? writing in tunnel-like darkness, forming letters and words? Yes, and precisely under these circumstances with a particular presence of mind.
And all the while, even though she now lacked the even rhythm of walking, there continued—except that by this time it was at an almost dizzying speed—the carousel of places and settings, darting, hot on each other's heels, into the middle of whatever she was doing, and shooting through her; eventually also more like a cable or valley railroad.
And in the meantime the series included places and things that did not belong to her in particular and did not originate in her own experience. Yes, that spot along the brook now, under the ash by the cow pasture, in the autumn rain that sounded so entirely different in the wilted, fallen, brittle foliage than in summer, that spot had also been hers at one time.
But the hand that she saw next, a hand writing in the glow of an oil lamp, writing and writing and writing—in a rhythm she had never seen before—with a steel pen and black India ink, that was not her hand, or any hand from her own century, and the shoulders and profile of the writer that swept in along with the hand had transported her for a millisecond into the company of a man who, did he not belong to an era long past, would have been the author she dreamt of for her story? And I, the contemporary author in the village in La Mancha? What was I in comparison but a sort of stopgap?
And how had he come to appear to her on that mountain-crossing night, her ideal writer for this commission, her Miguel de Cervantes? “As Miguel wrote and writes and will have written in a certain way, one felt in one's own body, in one's own shoulders, one's own profile, one's arms, one's hips, one's legs, how oneself and one's story was, and could have been, and was being, traced by the moving writing instrument, and underlined, underlined and emphasized, emphasized and clad in beauty, clad in beauty and rendered truthful.”
And yes, now, brushing past her like a falling star, the abandoned railroad spur, breaking off at a road through the fields, complete with rusty warning signs in the grass, that was part of her life again, her era, and she could have told me the name of the place, and where to locate it. But then: a woman as foreign to her as she was familiar, driven off course onto a new continent, in an odyssey never before told: How had the lightning flashing through her shown her this stranger?—Odysseus in the shape of a woman, and not alone on her odyssey, but with her child, and this odyssey, according to the information accompanying the flash, would have been the contemporary equivalent of Homer's, the odyssey of a mother with her child! What a double-edged sword these flashes of places and constellations were: on the one hand confirming one's existence, on the other hand—well, double-edged.
BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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