Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  And each of them brooded, for at least part of the way, over where he or she had had something to do with her, under what murky circumstances? And what guilt they had incurred toward one another back at home? Or she toward him? Or him toward her there? Or had it been only in their thoughts? And now deeds would follow here. But if the few of them in the bus really (really?) did know each other from earlier: no one remembered from where or how. And the brooding soon ceased. They were all simply riding along; letting themselves be driven.

  They were heading south, with numerous roads turning off to the left and right toward villages far from the main road and invisible from it—often merely appearing to be villages, for once the bus passed the first houses, they often turned out to be towns, with a network of narrow, twisting streets and in the center a large, if unpaved, sandy square.

  The terrain rose, fell, and rose in long waves, dips, and elevations, almost imperceptibly, as was usual on the mesa. But after a while the land climbed noticeably for quite a long stretch. Ice flowers formed around the rims of the bus windows and then melted away in the hour after sunrise. Despite the climb, hardly any curves. Instead, where previously there had been turnoffs, there were now repeated detours, taking them away from the carretera in great arcs and then back to it, traversing the bleak, barren landscape, an utterly uninhabited in-between region, on gravel tracks. No one had got on or off the bus.

  The only inhabited place visible from the road, at a distance, was the city of Ávila, on its hill, far to the east; the houses of the old town almost hidden behind the encircling wall, bumped out in hundreds of places; round about it on the high plain, New Ávila, La Nueva Ávila, the larger of the settlements, half cordoning off the hill with buildings, forming a second, very different perimeter. The black clouds above the cathedral tower were flocks of jackdaws, as always.

  The bus had bypassed this old and new Ávila, maintaining always the same distance. The detours in the uninhabited area now occurred in the same rhythm as previously the turnoffs to the villages or towns. Later, when she described the bus trip to the author, she kept falling into the first person plural. “We had long since taken off our earphones.” (Yet at most one or two girls were listening to their music this way in the beginning.) “Instead of watching the film on the monitor above the front windshield, we looked out the windows, and despite the low angle of the sun had drawn back all the curtains.” (Yet only she and the children in the back, whose view of the screen was blocked by the library shelves in the midsection of the bus, were not following the film. “We sat ramrod straight, our hands on the backrests in front of us. Although we were familiar with the route from long ago, at every turnoff and detour we wondered where we were now; was this really the route to the Sierra? was it possible that this familiar village had changed so much since the last time we passed through? only the name still the same? and over there, was that still the cliff from all the previous years, in the form of a rabbit stretched out on the ground? and is it only because of the detour that today we see in its place a kneeling camel?

  “And on the one hand, as unfamiliar as the foreland of our Sierra de Gredos appeared to us in almost every detail, on the other hand it seemed tremendously homelike to us; the more novel, the more homelike. The more unknown the fountain in the marketplace there—iced over, by the way—the clearer; we had had it before our eyes all along, and had merely overlooked it. The more surprisingly the medieval stone bridge arched away from the concrete bridge over which our bus drove straight ahead, the clearer: from the very beginning we had been crossing this section of bridge, we knew every stone, we could balance in our sleep on the remains of the parapet high above the rushing brook. The foreland was strange to us during that morning bus ride in a way that an area could appear strange only when we had not only traveled through it many times but had once actually resided and lived there, if very long ago. Resided long ago? Perhaps the entire time.”

  And she continued her story: “Perhaps it was not so much in this landscape that we had always lived but more or less together on this special bus. When I recall our trip into the foothills of the Sierra—you should remember, we should remember, one should remember—, from a certain moment during our travels together I can no longer say which of us passengers, or, more accurately, travelers, was who, which of us did what, or to which of us what was done. The one who bit into an apple was the old man there wearing the mountaineer’s hat, and at the same time the driver, bent over the wheel, as well as the young city girl next to me with a student’s briefcase, and me myself. The person with one arm in a sling was, among others, also me.

  “Several people in the bus, including me, had taken off their shoes or boots. One time this person or that, no, all of us, heaved a sigh, in the same moment, a deep sigh, a brief accompaniment to the hardly changing sound of the engine. You and I, and likewise he and she, turned a page. One woman was in the late stages of pregnancy, and I with her. For a while our ears were blocked from the change in altitude, and we could no longer follow the conversation between our driver and his son, which continued uninterrupted during almost the entire journey. One time I vomited, no, that was one of the children in the very bumpy back, or wasn’t it me after all, in addition to this person and that?

  “We cried from toothache, held our heads to counteract sinus pressure, expelled clouds of breath when we got off at the first rest stop. In between we laughed in unison during one-minute naps. We jumped when a heavy blackbird crashed into a window. One woman had a nosebleed, as did the man over there, and I over here was also bleeding from the nose, even though only one nose was bleeding, drops so hot that they almost burned a hole in my clothes when they fell. From a certain threshold on, chataba in Arabic, in the area or merely on the bus trip, we had become communicating tubes, and what happened to one of us flowed at the same time into the other travelers and equalized its level.

  “And the most obvious thing we shared was the sensory impressions. Blinded by the first sunlit patch of snow, all of us shut our eyes at the same moment. Together we tasted, yes, tasted the steady morning wind during that first rest stop in the foothills. And what united us the most during that entire time, for better and for worse, in patience or in tranquillity, in fear or in worry, was our shared hearing or listening: to the way the engine kept running; to when a plane would break the sound barrier again; to the way the children in the back, and thus the rest of us with them, played their games, calmly and thereby generating patience, as uninhibitedly and loudly as if nothing were wrong; to the way the library books in the flexible bumped-out midsection of the bus constantly rubbed against each other, pounded against each other, or, when it was a question of movie cassettes, clicked and clacked against each other, they, too, as if nothing were wrong.”

  “It sounds as though the bus provided a kind of shelter or refuge for all of you,” the author remarked. She continued: “If we were all of one mind during the journey into the Sierra, it was against the backdrop of a constant threat and a heightened vulnerability, exacerbated by our sitting still so long in that large, overly long bus, whereas, on the other hand, riding along, precisely in that immensely long vehicle, created the feeling, or the illusion—but: the main thing was the feeling and illusion! ¡sentimiento y ilusión!—of safety.

  “In becoming open and receptive to one another this way, between anxiousness and gentleness, we formed, for the duration of the travel interlude, a society, a lovely one, full of life. It’s up to you, writer, to transform it into a lasting one.”—The author: “Please go on.”—The client: “We drove, whether uphill or occasionally downhill again, at an even, slow pace, as if that, too, provided a kind of security. Although for quite some time now no more detours had been marked, the driver sometimes turned off onto side roads, parts of the old road, narrow, curving, along rushing brooks, between towering cliffs.

  “This old road had been out of use for so many years that what remained of the paving was overgrown with ground-blackberry runners. Her
e and there bushes were also growing in the middle of the road, and our bus snaked between them and drove over them, hardly slowing down, and since not only the roof but also porthole-like portions of the floor were glazed, as is the case with quite a few of the most advanced vehicles nowadays, with shatterproof glass, we could see, time after time, all around us, overhead, to left and right, but also underneath, the branches whipping together and bouncing apart.

  “It was almost an eternity since another vehicle had traversed these byways, at least any motorized one, and certainly not a bus—this was probably the first time a bus had passed this way—and in two or three places a tree had grown up in the middle of the road, if only a spindly one, a birch, a pine, an ash; whereupon the driver, who among other tools also had a saw with him, got out with his son and cut down the obstacle without more ado. After one such stop, as we drove on, a bunch of winter grapes bobbed above the front windshield, silvery balls with black pistils in the center.

  “In contrast to the new road through the mountains, the stretches of the old one onto which we turned off did not run through a completely unpopulated area. At least some stretches of it seemed inhabited—though the houses, all of which were separate structures, with nothing else far and wide, revealed themselves on our approach to be in ruins, and not only since yesterday, apparently, but rather at least since several decades earlier, even centuries. For the most part they were remnants of mills and animal sheds; but also in one place of a school (so, beyond one granite hillock or another there must have once been farmsteads with many children), and in another place of an inn, located where six or eight mountain paths, long since abandoned and half-buried, more likely old cattle trails, crossed each other, forming a star, an inn for which the name venta must have been literally appropriate years ago.

  “Our old road was one of these roads crossing the others, the only one that was still passable, if barely, and there it reached its first pass summit, a dip in the peaks of the Sierra de Paramera, the range in front of our Sierra de Gredos and not nearly as high. And there, where a bit farther on, already visible from below, the new road branched off from the main pass, the Puerto de Menga, open on all sides, and rejoined our carretera antigua, reassuringly, yet not so reassuringly after all, we stopped for the first time for a brief rest.

  “Even the couple of trees around the tumbledown inn looked rather like ruins, were split, partially stripped of their bark, and seared with burn marks from lightning strikes. The one healthy tree amid the rubble, which elsewhere in the south and up into the lower reaches of the mountains would be a fig, its roots further splitting the walls, was an oak here, a sturdy tree, yet almost like one growing high in the mountains, whose ball-like burls, looking like sharp elbows, seemed to be jabbing at the remains of the building around it and taking them into a headlock; the inn’s roof had in any case long since been sent flying by the tree’s hard-asa-rock crown. We sat and stood during our rest period between what remained of the walls, under the tree, which still had all its leaves, though they were dead, rattling in the mountain wind.

  “No one spoke except the driver and his young son, who carried on their conversation as they had since the beginning of the journey, without interruption, in dreamy voices, sounding more and more alike, the little boy’s at the same pitch as the father’s. The group of children also listened in silence, one of them turning out to be an adult once out in the open, yet his face still indistinguishable from the others’. The driver and his son had hauled a crate with refreshments—more than just apples and nuts—from the bus to the ruins of the inn; each traveler could help himself, and did just that.

  “Only once were we startled: when the driver and his son, breaking off their dialogue, shouted in unison to a child who had wandered just a step away from the vicinity of the ruins/bus. Mines? A precipice? Overgrown cellar holes? Or did that simply mean: Everyone stay together!!”?

  She went on telling her story, in a voice that was increasingly less that of a woman than that of a woman, man, child, and old person, young and old in one, yet with a frequency coming through from time to time, as a tonic or dominant, that could only be that of a woman: “For a long, long while we remained in the roofless and windowless tumbledown inn at the top of that old pass into the Sierra that had outlived its usefulness decades or centuries earlier. The noticeable feature of the few crossings into the mountains is that the weather changes constantly in those hollows, because of the warmer upwind from the much steeper southern flanks. Even in the case of that pass through the foothills, the wind kept colliding with the cold northern air and promptly produced a rain cloud, followed by a snow cloud, then a fog belt snaking along the gentler northern slopes. All around, the sky maintained an unchanging blue, while only at very brief intervals did this blue aloft reach us in the hollow with the ruins.

  “And even during the brief stretches of blue sky and sunshine, without a cloud or wisp of fog, now and then heavy, dense drops of rather mild rain would plunk down on us, out of the clear blue sky, as if coming from a sky somewhere behind the other one—just as, when a few moments later the appropriate cloud came over, despite the dampness and near darkness, only single drops would fall—or out of this blue would also flash single yet steady snowflakes, as if coming from outer space, which, when they hit the current of southerly air, were blown back up into the blue of the atmosphere.

  “Those of us who, unlike the children—who stayed together in pairs or groups—did not perch in the almost entirely empty window openings, squatted for the most part on our heels in a circle around the driver, his son, and the crate of provisions; and a few stretched out in the corners, on the ground, on paper, the adults as if taking cover, while the children everywhere in the ruins’ window openings constituted a sort of peacekeeping force. In one corner of the former venta still stood a cast-iron stove, not all that rusted, but minus its pipe, and next to it, and looking even older than the stove, a heap of firewood, as if stacked there in ancient times, whose bottom logs, however, neither rotted nor mildewed like the others, produced a remarkably fresh, almost smokeless fire in the open stove—which, however, gave off hardly any heat—and it is true that none of us wanted to warm ourselves, whether we needed to or not.

  “Even in its better days the inn’s floor had consisted not of wooden planks but, in all of its three or four rooms—in the meantime merged into one—of packed clay, and in one corner was a stone-lined tub, full of water: rainwater channeled in from the outside by a gutter? no, an actual spring there, inside the building a barely visible pulsing and swirling from way down below, and one of us who stuck his hand in exclaimed in surprise, made a face, and we all followed suit: the springwater in the niche, or, to use a current expression, in the ‘wet room,’ of the medieval venta was warm—unexpectedly so for us, coming from the wintry air, even hot to the touch, and it emitted or rather exuded that smell ‘of rotten eggs’ that indicates sulphur, as I hope you, an author who should know his science, will realize, the stench now growing stronger, invading the nostrils of even those most impervious to smells: the stench was so powerful for a few moments, the sulphurous wave so overwhelming, that we, with the exception of the children, who merely laughed, as at everything unexpected, at first reacted with an almost imperceptible impulse to flee, which expressed itself in our holding our breath or failing to blink: gas attack? ptomaine? But then: the driver and his son stretching out on the clay floor by the sulphur spring, and, on their stomachs, their faces half in the water, drinking from it, ‘good for sore throat, stomach problems, panic attacks,’ while they continued to converse, calmly, as they had done all the while, their speech intermittently reduced to a gurgling, but nonetheless still comprehensible.

  “And we followed the lead of those two, whether it was really and truly a healing spring, and whether that had been the case since Roman times, indeed since the original inhabitants, the so-called Numantians, or not; even the children gulped the water, lying on their stomachs, and how. And at the sam
e time an airplane, very low over the old pass, flying excessively slowly, to the eye hardly faster than the falcons overhead; with a heavy belly, its dark-green paint like camouflage (which, on the other hand, clashed with all the natural colors in the area, whether in the air or on the ground), its fuselage as broad as it was short, and its roar menacing. As the children had previously waved to everything along the way that showed a sign of life, they now did the same, gesturing from their windows in the ruins, arms flailing, voices yelling. And a hand up in the cockpit waved back, as if it could not help it, just as on the previous stretch of road the children’s impetuous and enthusiastic greetings had been answered from the trucks, from the horse-drawn carts—there were more and more of them—and also from the cars of the police patrols. We adults presumably remained invisible to the pilot under the crown of oak leaves, and likewise our bus, or was it taken for a wreck or a greenhouse?

  “Where the old road, beyond the puerto—which means, as you will know, if, as I hope and trust, you are familiar with foreign languages, both ‘pass’ and ‘harbor’—joined the new one down below, a hiker was walking along the shoulder, heading south and toward the Sierra, with a knapsack over his shoulder, and although the airplane’s shadow swallowed him up for a few moments, the man continued on his way, calmly, or at least without missing a beat; without glancing up or to the side; his gaze fixed on the granite gravel, as if he were walking in someone’s footsteps.

  “Before the bomber appeared, when only its roar was to be heard, whatever was in motion in the sky or on the ground had fled. Everything scattered; or seemed to scatter. A hare dashed off in a zigzag, followed in a straight line by a herd of wild boar. The falcons scattered, or rather swooped off in all directions—a provision for actual fleeing clearly not part of their natural endowment? Even the clouds and billows of fog taking flight.”