Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  Suddenly she broke off her scarcely begun narrative: that was another habit for which she was known. She went to the kitchen, which was far away, not merely around several corners but also up and down several staircases, and brought back food. And with every dish it was plain that she was the one who had put the finishing touches on it.

  They shoved the little table over to the one window, “the flue” (her expression) for the former smoking room, so as to have a view during the meal, if only of the blackness of the night. Later the chef and lord of the manor came and ate with them; and as a threesome they then had even more room than as a twosome earlier.

  She named each of the dishes in turn: “smoked bacon”—actually slices of the superb ham from the “boar of the black claw”; “cellar salad”—actually the cress that grows in star-shaped clusters even in wintertime on the steppe, above subterranean veins of water, with an especially delicate sourness at that time of year; “ragout of pickled herring, salt cod, and chicken drumstick”—actually she brought in a brass bowl in which strands or strips of freshly steamed brook or river crayfish, trout, and equally light-colored little cubes of lamb were meticulously arranged in meanders that nestled against each other, reproducing the courses of the brooks or rivers of the plateau; “prunes and dried apples”—actually oranges, oranges, and more oranges, which had just ripened, in wintertime, their freshness and juiciness unequaled by any other fruit; “with the last bits of dry cheese rind”—actually dry and actually hardly more than bits of rind, but how pungent; “the last smidgen of cider, from the year before last, the last drops from the last cask”—actually a last smidgen, though of wine, and what a last smidgen.

  In between she appeared with a portrait, framed in rock crystal, of Juana, the allegedly or supposedly mad queen, a work painted by Zurbarán, painter of saints, almost a century after the death of the allegedly or supposedly mad woman; she placed it on the windowsill—the painting’s height exceeded that of the window, for it was not only Zurbarán’s saints that demanded height—and offered the following description: “a charcoal drawing by the local village idiot, a portrait of a stable maid here, who is also the village idiot’s mother, father unknown.”

  In the oil painting, mad Juana, painted very dark, was gazing out the window of her tower in Tordesillas; far below and at a considerable distance lay the río Duero in the last or first light of day, with glittering banks of granite, still there today in almost the same locations. And this queen showed no signs of insanity whatsoever; at most perhaps in the brightness of her long garment, with no source of light visible in her chamber; bright, positively glowing against the dark masonry, also her hand, with which she was pointing not outside but rather to some interior space, perhaps the room next to hers?: she had just risen from her chair—but there was no chair in her chamber, the chamber was empty—no, jumped up, no, she had dashed there from somewhere else, had run there, and now was pointing, with eyes wide and gazing upward and her mouth open, into impenetrable darkness, while holding in her other hand an open book, a single page of which was standing straight up in the air from her running. How the palm of her pointing hand glowed, as did her abnormally long index finger, which against the dark background resembled a flashlight.

  “How differently this supposedly insane woman points out of the picture than the white angel toward the empty grave. She seems to be pointing out something to herself alone, and not in a regal or commanding fashion at all, but in inexpressible astonishment, terminally astonished. Never again will she emerge from this moment of staring in wonder and amazement. At one time, when children became distracted in the middle of a game or some other rhythmic activity and just stared into space, people might say, ‘Hey there, stop staring into the idiot box!’ But this supposedly insane woman is certainly not staring into any idiot box.” Who said that? None of the three at the table could have answered the question. Perhaps no one had really spoken at all.

  If they had been somewhat on edge earlier, the evening meal had calmed them. And if they had been calm earlier, it had calmed them still more. And if they had been fighting fatigue before, now they let it have its way with them, and at the same time part of them became wide awake. And at the same time they were porous, unusual nowadays during a meal?, porous in the direction of both day and night, as porous as sometimes on the borderline between the clarity of being awake and the very different clarity of a dream.

  She looked through the key bow at the lord of the manor / chef. The wrought-iron bow was so wide that it could accommodate both of her eyes. Behind the interwoven Oriental motifs they appeared as if behind a grating. And she said he had not yet learned to stand at the stove as a whole person. The way he cooked left part of his body disengaged. The idea that one should be completely involved in any process and any activity—“The whole person must take part”—applied especially to food preparation. One’s toes, knees, thighs, hips, shoulders, all had to pitch in. In his case, only the hands and eyes were active. And the result?: despite all the seasonings he had obviously tracked down for his kitchen, didn’t one seasoning seem to be missing, or rather a rhythm, from the individual dishes as well as from the sequence of dishes?; didn’t rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef?

  The chef replied, which means that he did open his mouth after all in the course of this night, with this story (“Do not be afraid to let something contradictory appear now and then in these pages!”), and commented that “The whole person must take part” probably applied as much to a baker or a hermit or a lover as to a chef. And, he said, he had just cooked for them as a “whole person,” and then he had tasted the difference himself. Except that occasional breaks in his rhythm had been caused by this dear visitor’s presence. He did not mean her in particular, he added, but the presence of a stranger in general, no, not a stranger—but anyone. The minute someone watched him cooking, he lost his rhythm, even when the observer was kindly disposed toward him or truly enthusiastic about what he was doing—especially then. In his profession he could not stand observers of any kind.

  And that was also true of actions that had nothing whatever to do with food preparation. If someone stood beside him while he was hammering in a nail, he was “guaranteed” to bend it. Even if someone watched him simply tying his shoelaces—and the person in question did not have to be looking straight at him; the mere presence was enough—: the laces were bound to end up all knotted.

  As a child he had already feared any kind of observer, he continued. He had learned early to ride a horse, in secret. But the first time someone watched him ride, he had promptly fallen off. When he and others had shown off how well they could shinny up an oak tree, he had been the only one to get stuck halfway up the thick trunk (he could still see himself hanging there, on the lone tree in the middle of the cow pasture, and slowly sliding back down the trunk)—and when he had tried it again alone, he had reached the top faster than the fastest one in the group. And his fear of observers had then become a sort of hatred of them. Yes, he hated observers—of whatever sort. Even love was in danger of turning to hate, or to irritation, which was just as bad, when the loved one stood watching him do something he could do only when he was alone. And (here he laughed once) almost everything that mattered to him, and particularly his cooking, was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved.

  Here his second guest chimed in briefly. The entrepreneur—or whatever he was on this evening—said that precisely a rhythm that was broken here and there, the interruption at some stages, the loss of all rhythm at certain moments while the food was cooking, the cook’s palpable state of intimidation and his hesitation during individual transitions in the complicated preparation process, made the phases that came before and after—when he was working alone in the kitchen, undisturbed by her, the other person—all the more significant, accounting ultimately for the lasting impression, the “fabulous” aftertaste, which was no less “real” than the first direct impression this evening meal made on th
e palate, “which I—and this is no mere turn of phrase—will never forget. O infinite alphabet of taste.” Hadn’t the tasting they had all done been a form of spelling-out and also memorizing or recollecting?

  The last word in their dinner-table conversation belonged to the banker (or whatever she was, and not only on this night). She remarked that it had not been her intention at all to call the meal into question. On the subject of “my lord chef” as a person, she had also meant something else entirely. In contrasting his way of doing things with the notion of “the whole person must take part,” she had been intent on working through a problem, “which in turn is part of my profession.” And now as a threesome they had just worked through this problem.

  As far as she herself was concerned, she had recognized during the working-through that she was exactly the opposite. She could undertake a task as a “whole person” only in the presence of someone else, a “third party,” even if the third party existed only in her imagination. So as “to walk,” or “merely to take one step,” “to calculate,” or “merely to type up numbers,” “to draft a plan,” or “merely to fiddle with possible combinations” as a whole person, she had to be able to picture observers, and beyond that inspectors, “judges,” so to speak, as if she were “in a contest, no, a competition!” “onstage, no, in an arena!” Even when looking at something as simple as a spoon or a piece of string, for instance, she felt a sort of obligation to view the string “as a whole person,” “or vice versa, when being looked at, to allow myself to be looked at by the other person, or animal, as a whole person!”

  Yet as she sat there now: no one else’s gaze could get to her, and not only because of her eyes behind the giant key. There nothing was looking at me, let alone a whole person. And above all nothing allowed itself to be looked at by us, let alone … “In her way of not letting herself be looked at from time to time she resembled less an actress on the screen and definitely more a policeman on the street. He may look at me—if by no means as a whole person—, but does not allow himself to be looked at, not in the slightest, even when he is standing a hand’s breadth from me.” So that night she did not have the last word after all?

  Who said that?—The author in La Mancha, in his village, much later. And he will have added, “The whole person must tell the story!” And she will have replied, beaten and battered as she will be by then, and still shaky from her time in the Sierra de Gredos: “What you call the policeman’s gaze has in reality been my defense and my armor. And if I positioned myself time and again this close to another person, it was to leave that person no room for killing, and likewise no room for any kind of embrace. I moved in so close simply in order to become unapproachable. During a long period in my life I crowded in close, body to body, so that my enemies or adversaries could not lift their little finger against me. It has finally become clear to me: I acted this way—it was a constant, uninterrupted acting, and woe to me if I ever shrank back—because I feared death.”—The author: “And feared love?”—She: “For a long time that, too, was a kind of fear of death, a particularly bad, acute form.”

  There are insinuations that my heroine spent that night near Tordesillas with a lover. In one version it was the chef and lord of the manor, in another the failed entrepreneur, in yet another an unnamed third person. But whatever the source: he is the false narrator. And the fellow is a false narrator not only because he offers false information, because he lies—and he is lying, in fact; he lies the gray slime out of the cracks in the ground—but the apocryphal swindler and slippery speculator is a false narrator furthermore because he is telling something that in my view ought not to be told—that in my view does not belong in a story, certainly not in this one here.

  Our story here, even on the darkest night, and, I would hope, at some point also the hottest night, must take place beneath the sky, the most spacious of skies. The aforementioned insinuations, however, do not take place under any sky. And besides, they do not take place; they are merely insinuated. And insinuations and ulterior motives are the very opposite of the sky, the one that arches above our heads, as well as that of storytelling—the antithesis of anything remotely connected with the heavens, including your heavenly body. The scoundrels who want to sneak into my book are merely pretending to tell a story. They are feinting, as in fencing. The minute they open their mouths, or rather their traps, they lie—and at the same time they lie like a book, and that is what is special about these literary liars, and what makes this old expression so appropriate again nowadays. But the problem is not that these no-goods and would-be competitors lie. If only it really were a problem; problems, as we know, are productive.

  I, too, lie, when the moment is ripe; I can lie the blue out of the sky and even more out of the darkest cracks in the ground. Yet the lies you false storytellers dish up—just to finish with this topic—are not exactly fiendish (you’re all too dodgy and at the same time too stodgy, abandoned one and all by any kind of spirit, including the evil ones), but exactly the opposite. How, for instance, can my heroine spend a night with a toy merchant? And what serious reader would not shake his head at the suggestion that she lay that night in the arms of a chef (even if, on the evening in question, he may have had a golden touch in the kitchen for a change and is perhaps in fact a master of his métier—a métier grievously overvalued these days, in my humble opinion, by the way)?

  The most likely scenario I could imagine for our woman would be a night of lovemaking with an unknown and invisible third person. Not a night of love but a night of struggle. A life-and-death struggle. In which she remained victorious in the end. Will have remained. Luckily for me. This way our story can continue.

  But such a third person would also be counterfeit. He must not exist. He does not belong here. He does not come to my mind. He does not enter my mind. First of all, this story of ours takes place in a time when for not a few people physical union had come to represent something wonderful again, and accordingly something rare. And then, too, the moment for that, and especially the place for that, had not yet come in the story. A night of love in a castle was out of the question, even in the vicinity of the Sierra de Gredos.

  The only touching that took place: she placed her hand on someone’s shoulder before going to bed. She did not say whose. And when it came to the next touch she was already alone: having stepped into her room and closed the door behind her, she leaned against the door frame. As for the chef, he had already almost fallen asleep at the table; all his strength and sense of urgency had gone into the preparation of the meal. And as for the traveling entrepreneur, as he himself reported, he had been positively relieved to trot off to his solitary bed: ever since his collision with the lady banker, but not only because of that, he saw only danger in any encounter with a woman, and left the scene afterward with the thought: Scraped by again! Got out alive again!

  Her brother traveled only by night, and that had always been the case, not merely since he had become a fugitive, or, as now, a deportee. They said it was because the accident involving his parents and the other brother had occurred in broad daylight. But what didn’t “they” say. After a few weeks, he had run away from the boarding school (in those days they still kept the pupils locked in) to which his grandparents had taken him, hardly more than a child—at his own request, for he wanted to become a priest—after nightfall, and had set out, only ten years old, on the nocturnal pilgrimage, yes, pilgrimage, along country roads and across fields, back to the Sorbian village, more than thirty miles away; before sunrise he was suddenly standing beside his sister, who had been awakened by an unusual weight on her bed: an armful of early apples that her brother had picked in the orchard behind the house (it was the end of September). And this child who had returned home promptly named the different varieties: “Shepherd’s Apples, found in the woods by a French shepherd.—Alexander Lukas, found in the woods around the year 1870 by a certain Alexander Lukas.—Princess of Angoulême, an old French variety, named after the daughter of Lou
is the Sixteenth, the king who was guillotined.—Dear Louise of Avranches.—Cox Orange: bred in 1830 by an Englishman named Cox.—Ontario: bred in 1887 on Lake Ontario in Canada.”

  This time, too, her brother was traveling by night, through the long winter night, almost without stopping. Even his intermittent pauses were part of his traveling: waiting for a train connection; waiting for a car that finally stopped; waiting in a hiding place for guards and patrols to pass.

  Cold, and hardly anything to eat: and yet he did not mind in the slightest traveling by night. So long as it was night: he did not need much more. Unlike her, he was in his element moving around at night. If she was not already asleep, she had to be at her destination by midnight at the latest, in a house, close to a bed. He, on the other hand, even when he was not traveling, made his rounds in the dark, between dusk and dawn. During his years in prison, when he was not pacing or dancing around his cell at night, he lay on his cot, drawing spirals in the air, and if he happened to fall asleep for a bit, he felt even more imprisoned during such nocturnal sleep than he already was. The nights for him were made for sniffing out, tracking down, rummaging around. As a fifteen-year-old he had written poems, all of which had night as their subject. She still knew two lines from one of his night poems by heart: “Snakes on the prowl rummage through the stillness, / Night—and only the will lives!” Since that time she referred to her brother as “the night-rummager.” And now for all these years he had not been able to rummage through a single night. And waiting to be set free had had nothing in common with the waiting during his nocturnal journeys.