Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  “Mix-ups?”—“Yes, at first I mistook the heartbeat in my ear,” she told the author later, “—not surprisingly, after a long day of driving alone—for someone pounding on a steel door or the rumbling of a wrecking ball. But that was all. Or I more and more often mistook the books that quite a few people had in their hands for dog leashes. Or when someone raised his cane, I saw it as a gun pointed at me—except that I did not immediately pull my own trigger, as is said to have happened more than once in Nuevo Bazar.

  “What continued to haunt me: the suspicion that every phenomenon in that place had been tampered with—and the sense of irreality. That became most clear to me at the time, at the time? when I, who usually derive my perceptions of real shapes and colors from a kind of tasting, tried to recall the evening meal I had eaten at the hostel: I simply could not remember what I had eaten there barely an hour or two earlier, and in particular I had not the slightest aftertaste.

  “But,” she continued, “unlike the Zone historian’s, my gaze did not remain fixated. Or I used whatever I was fixated on as a point of departure. I willed it that way, for my story.”—The author: “Is that something a person can will?”—She: “Yes, it can be willed and resolved. I willed and resolved to push off from my fixations, and by means of them, and that came to pass. And thus it was that there, in the so-called Zone, I found my way back into my story and our book.

  “That historiador and those who consider themselves his successors or disciples, the whole tribe of ‘friends of history,’ with their cultural continuity: all well and good. Yet our book has an even greater continuity as its subject, which should not preclude—on the contrary—the narration of equally brief, even the very briefest, moments, and the inclusion of various things that verge on dreams—though only verge—, in which time leaps, or is suspended, or piles up, becoming concentrated and even dense enough to touch, as occasionally happens in a Western; remember The Searchers, when the family waits in silence, alone on the prairie, for the Indians’ attack and for death; and the compressed time in Rio Bravo, where all night long the trumpet of death is played for the group under siege in the jail, and in the end it feels as though not just one night has passed but an epic year, an epically compressed eternity.

  “Your task is to describe not cultural continuity but the grander time, and it cannot happen, it is simply not permissible, for the future to appear as an impossibility, as is the case with the Zone archivist.”—The author: “Please accept my thanks for this lecture. But in my previous life as a writer have I not done quite a bit, or tried to, to develop a sense of this grander, or also merely different, time, and to make it strong enough to bear the weight of this long story and that, and this and this, and another and yet another?”—The woman from the riverport city: “What do you think induced me to select you, of all people, to write this particular book? Idiot.”—The author: “But why a man for this assignment? Wouldn’t a woman be more suitable, and also more appropriate to the spirit of the times, as the teller of your adventures?”—She: “Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling, whether a man or a woman tells the story. The minute you begin to tell a story, you are neither a man nor a woman anymore, but simply the storyteller, or, better still, you are the pure embodiment of storytelling. And by the way: be more sparing in your use of ‘so to speak’ and ‘as it were.’” —The author: “And should I assume that when someone’s story is told it does not matter whether the subject is a man or a woman?”

  The riverport woman: “No, no, no. Our book must be about my story, a woman’s story if ever there was one.”—The author: “In what respect, for instance?”—She, gazing along the line of her shoulder to the distant horizon on that side: “To begin with, simply by virtue of telling a long story, a very long story, perhaps longer than all your previous ones. If a story is to be told about me, and in general, about a woman, it must be a long, long, long story—and something other than a woman’s novel or a chronicle of life at court. If suited to our times, then something of this sort. And simultaneously, my, and our, story should run counter to our age, as is appropriate for a book, or is it not?, should circumvent it, transcend it, subvert it, no? And by the way, be more sparing in your use of ‘for instance’: it is obvious that every detail in our book suggests an example, no?”—The author: “A story as long as Gone with the Wind? And about a woman in finance, whose image as a woman is distorted or even destroyed by the image of money?”—The woman from the riverport city: “For all I care, equally long, or almost as long, or half as long—even that would be something—as Gone with the Wind, but in other respects with no resemblance to it. Or perhaps not, after all?”

  And she continued to gaze along her shoulder, and said, after a long pause, “And besides, I have nothing to do with financial matters anymore. I am, so to speak, no longer a banking princess, as it were. I have changed professions.”—The author: “Since when?”—She: “Since last night. An eternity ago. Since my crossing of the Sierra de Gredos. Since the evening, night, and morning in the Zone of Nuevo Bazar.” And she gazed along the line of her shoulder, which swiveled gently as she did so, toward the far-off horizon, now at her back, and fell into a silence that lasted for some time and became more profound with every breath, eventually giving way to something like a pulsing, and gradually drawing in the author.

  She had moved through Nuevo Bazar as if along a diagonal or the line formed by a cross section. The images she encountered, also in her pushing-off from the established “track” (the word supplied by the Zone archivist), with the omnipresent images of shopping, organized events, happenings, and other stimuli in the foreground (and in N.B. these foregrounds predominated), prevented even one of those images from poking her, images that, according to her conviction, represented and refreshed the world for her and for everyone, and were the main point of her book.

  But that did not matter now. First of all, it had been her experience that in any case those world-conjuring images, whether here in Nuevo Bazar or at home in the riverport city, did not show up in the evening. They belonged to the morning; were part of the morning; brought with them and brought about what made the morning the real morning.

  And besides, she had always trusted sleep and the revitalization it could be expected to bring. Nor did it disturb her that the glimpses through the few gaps, actually mere cracks, into the background of the settlement revealed images of desolation, of despair, or of sheer nonsense; that just kept her more awake. From the beginning to the end of the diagonal line, there was no building on the right or the left whose ground floor did not have a shop window. These shop windows usually took up the width of the entire ground floor, and often the entire façade as well, from the street level up to the top floor, the fifth, sixth, seventh. Quite a few of the façades had no front doors, suggesting that the rooms behind them, from bottom to top, were merely display spaces? Next to them almost identical shops, all just as brightly illuminated, the wares laid out in exactly the same way, except that automatic doors let one enter and buy, the stores still open at this late hour, the clerks lit up like statues and as motionless as the solitary mannequins in the neighboring buildings. Each showcase façade showing only one type of item, from bottom to top, but in multiples, masses of them, so that next to one display with thousands of fur coats came another with equally many suitcases, and next to that, one with ten thousand wall clocks, and so forth.

  The sensation of moving between two stationary railroad trains, with multiple decks entirely of glass, or are the trains gradually beginning to move after all?; the sensation further reinforced by the music, which remains the same from car to car, from the six hundred thirteen garden chairs stacked up in one, to the three thousand four hundred bicycles symmetrically arranged on stands up to the roof in the next, and the thirty thousand wine bottles in yet another.

  And the gaps and backgrounds in this cross section: What is going on with them? They exist, though perhaps not every time in the literal sense. One of the stores, depots,
showcase buildings, annexes, although as glaringly lit as all the others, is empty, white walls without shelves; not a clothes hanger nor carton nor even thumbtack to be seen, not merely cleared out and awaiting a new shipment, also not newly erected and therefore standing empty until the following day or the following week, but empty this way for a long time already, and for the duration, yet in its emptiness, even without a sign, or the name of a company, or a street number, in business, like the other stores along the diagonal, or at least ready to go into business.

  For first of all there is the usual automatic glass door, opening and inviting even someone passing at a distance to enter; and then in the background (yes, background) of this store that has always been empty, one person, obviously the manager, in a three-piece suit and tie, on a chair, low and extremely narrow, at a very small but immaculately polished table, on which he has placed both hands, his fingers extended, spread wide, his nails rounded and manicured as only a salesman’s or businessman’s would be, while he sits there very erect, keeping his eye on the door—in contrast to the clerks in the neighboring compartments (most of them constantly talking to each other, some of them apparently distracted)—the epitome of presence of mind, without a trace of an item for sale, without a catalogue, without a computer, without a telephone, without paper and pencil, without toothpicks, without a Jew’s harp, without an ammunition belt.

  Another such gap and background is formed when, for a change, the stores along the diagonal of Nuevo Bazar are not constructed in an unbroken line but leave between them a crack to slip into, not large enough to slip through—for that there is not enough room. In one of these very rare niches one’s eye then encounters, as elsewhere the metal shopping carts that have been left standing, pushed away, allowed to crash into each other, similarly overturned baby carriages, which seem to have careened off course, a pile of similarly rusted lower and upper frames, the fabric long since gone, the wheels sticking up, as if these conveyances, like the pushcarts, had been merely borrowed (and simply left standing after use, or shoved out of the way).

  And yet another background image of this sort came from the duplicate posters pasted on every display window, photos or artists’ renderings of children and adolescents who had gone missing here in the Zone—there were dozens of these posters—and dozens upon dozens of the equally many wanted terrorists: and since the children had often been missing for so long that their photos had been altered to make them recognizable at an older age, and, conversely, because often the only available portraits of the long-sought perpetrators of violence were from their youth, the posters, which all had the same size and the same format, resembled each other to the point of being indistinguishable.

  And another such background forms precisely in conjunction with these other images, the prevailing, conspicuous ones—from which one pushes off or allows one’s gaze to be propelled like an arrow from a special bow: for instance (there it is again, “for instance”), up high, on the seventh and top floor, the attic of a bookstore, all of whose floors up to that one are chock-full of piles, in the form of temples, pyramids, pile dwellings, from level two to level seven the same title, all the millions of copies equally thick, with the same colors on the dust jackets, with identical spines; but under the roof one book that apparently slipped through the cracks and was hung, facedown, its pages open, on some rope or in a fishnet used as decoration, of a thickness different from the others’, without its dust jacket, obviously already partially read, so that, if one had a good telescope handy—which one does—in whose sight the book and its individual lines could be brought as close as certain figures on the cornice of a medieval tower could be brought to an observer on the ground, from whose naked eye they were far, far away, they would allow themselves to be deciphered thus: “In a village in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived not long ago …”

  Despite the winter night and the icy cold, which blew in all the more piercingly because the settlement itself was heated by the banks of electrical coils, for a long time you could not see anyone’s breath in the crowd; but suddenly there was one breath cloud here, and then another there, literal billows of fog in front of their faces; and finally one of the nocturnal passersby completely shrouded in a ball of white vapor, having just stepped out of a walk-in refrigerator? or from out there on the crackling-cold dark steppe on the mesa?

  And now the lone farmer’s vehicle on the diagonal street, a small delivery van, the back filled with sacks of potatoes and fruit, the vehicle and its load evenly covered with a thin layer of snow, which, regardless of the heaters, remains frozen solid, the snow reproducing the wind out on the savannah, in ridges, ripples, small mounds like dunes.

  And the lone pedestrian now, who surprisingly looks unlike the others, otherwise so similar to one another, and in general stands out, more staggering than walking, not because he is drunk, but rather out of seemingly terminal despair, his eyes crisscrossed by it as if by ceaselessly scratching and scraping razor blades, in his hands on either side two knives at the ready, no, not yet at the ready, not yet snapped open, and why not? why not yet? when will he brandish them? what is holding him back?, and how does he even manage to place one foot in front of the other, to hold himself halfway upright, to avoid collisions?; extraordinary that he can make his way alive from one curb to the other without being torn apart halfway across by wretchedness and howling misery, which dribbles from his lips in the form of thick spittle and from his nose as snot, and bursts from his thorax as a howl (mistaken by the passersby for the roar of a distant Formula One engine as it accelerates on the final lap). Yes, when and where will this kind of despair finally tear this citizen of Nuevo Bazar to pieces? with a violence so terrible that it will have to tear each and every one of his fellow citizens and neighbors to pieces as well?

  And if the crowd of people along the diagonal, gradually thinning out and becoming sparse and no longer constituting a corso for quite a while now, moves along in procession as if on an invisible line, this happens out of uncertainty and fear: stay out of the wind and in the shadow of the person ahead of you at all costs! shielded by him as much as possible, as by the person behind you; eyes on the ground, so that you will be able to say with a clear conscience that you saw nothing of the explosions, the flames, the bloody tangles; and likewise blocking out the sound of the bombers droning high above this dome of artificial and warming daylight at midnight; talking at the very top of your voice, to yourself? on a satellite phone?; each person in the single-file procession uttering sounds with wide-open mouth that are neither Catalan nor Asturian nor Navarrian: a new language that has no adjectives, and especially no verbs, but only nouns; and these exclusively in abbreviations, such as MZ for manzana, apple; SDD for soledad, solitude; DS for dolores, pain; MC for merced, mercy; GRR for guerra, war; CBL for caballo, horse; SRR for sierra; CHN for chesnia, longing; and so forth; almost exclusively consonants; a vowel a rarity, a chance to take a breath; and all of these abbreviations or chopped-off words following each other in crazily quick succession, at the same time issuing from the throats as drawlingly, sloppily, and indistinctly as if this language were not being spoken by local residents, Spaniards or speakers of Romance languages; as if it were not a language at all but a mere intonation; and that of a very different language, borrowed from another language family entirely; outdoing even that people’s exaggerations and puffed-up, self-assured way of speaking, including the use of abbreviations and consonants, as if this ostentatious style helped them, in their solitary rushing along behind one another, banish their nocturnal fears by stalking along boastfully and giving them additional cover and protection.

  And not every building on the diagonal artery is exclusively a store or a warehouse; at least here and there some floors are occupied, especially basements, with awning windows high up on the walls, at street level; and every two dozen or so paces one hears a kind of music issuing from these semicellars into the loop being constantly repeated along the entire diagona
l, always solitary drumming; but this, too, always the same from basement to basement, the same rhythm, the same volume; the drum always tuned to the same note, struck as if by the same youngster home alone—his parents gone, on vacation, or vanished, never to be seen again; all the boys, and not a few girls among them, pounding on their instruments in the same monotone, whether with their fists or drumsticks, in a devil-, or whoever-, may-care fashion.

  And once, for a moment, for hardly as much as a measure, a third kind of music: suddenly chiming in and then immediately inaudible again; darting in from an unidentifiable direction, the instrument also hard to identify, a guitar? perhaps a lute? a gusla? a Jew’s harp? or maybe just a voice, after all? or, yes! a voice and an instrument, hovering in the air for a measure before falling silent, coming together, merging, melding; a single moment during the night along the diagonal line, when, out of the very meager backgrounds, instead of hopelessness and blind indignation, that sheltered preserve of the grander time came into focus, if only to the ear? precisely to the ear! insistently audible; two or three notes from afar and at the same time from just around the corner and heart-piercing, like a stiletto or a scalpel; stabbing as deep as possible, but not lethally.

  At last she turned off, to the side, to the outside. What? in Nuevo Bazar, where any and every spot represented the center, there was an outside? Yes, in the sense that all her life, whenever she had been in a place where she could not find her way out of the center, but was trapped there, encircled by foregrounds, superficial images, and other such provocations, she had made a point of hurling herself at the center; instead of darting to the side to escape, she had headed straight for the middle of the center; just as in a bazaar (and not only an Oriental one), assailed on all sides (and not merely by hissing Oriental voices), one could find peace and a space of one’s own by resolutely heading in the direction of the (not only Oriental) disturbers of the peace and taking a seat in their midst, as if one were one of them—which one was, after all, wasn’t one?