by Peter Handke
But there was one adventure-averse passenger or another who saw in her intervention a missionary zeal at work: a zeal that was “characteristic” in a different sense, stemming from guilt and intended to cover up a specific guilt. Were there not numerous examples of this sort of thing in history? The kind of person who gravitates toward being a helper, and at the same time a trendsetter or even leader, out of a guilt impossible to assuage in any other way? And then a third party chiming in, our author, let us say, with his daily view of the stony steppe of La Mancha, who wanted no truck with such opinions and explanations, and explained and opined that his protagonist simply was the way she was, and whatever she did or declined to do was simply what she did or declined to do.
And he asked—a rhetorical question that already implied its own answer—whether she, the woman there, had not, on the contrary, become a queen of banking precisely as a result of her innate capacity for service and for leaping into the breach, or because of the fundamental presence of mind that made these capacities possible and, in the case of the person in question, also worked hand in hand with the gift of foresight—the ability to foresee developments, structural shifts, overt and covert warfare, or a false peace born of inertia and an active, energetic peace, opening paths into uncharted territory: in the same sense as one of her historical predecessors, the banker and trader Jakob Fugger in sixteenth-century Augsburg, who was said to have displayed the powerful gift of foresight as “a form of perfect hearing” (here, too, he, the author, said he had done his research, actually more in contrast to his usual practice)?
It went along with this, and with foresight and presence of mind, he said, that she, like Jakob F., the greatest man in history when it came to “fructifying money,” had her roots, or whatever one called them, in a village. Early life in a village, opined and explained the researcher-author, himself a longtime refugee from the city, reinforced the aforementioned gifts, giving them a foundation and at the same time illuminating them, in the sense of “making them shine forth.”
And in the end he further explained these gifts of his heroine’s as resulting from her having spent her village childhood without parents—which meant that she, as the older child, always had to be responsible for her “little brother,” that—but fortunately for her and for the book, he interrupted himself here with a laugh, as if this explaining had been nothing but a game. She had been about to point out to him that he was creating the impression he had to defend her tooth and nail against someone, “almost like an admirer”; and he should refrain from this, in the interest of the story, up to the very last paragraph!
19
Remarkable how, with the adventurer at the wheel now, the passengers relaxed; likewise the sick driver, lying next to the enormous dog and only a short while ago still fighting for breath. After surviving these moments of mortal dread and loud, premature lamenting, the two of them were enjoying a sleep as sound as it was deep; snoring and wheezing. Yet she was driving considerably more briskly than her predecessor, and not merely because they were heading down the mountain (the serpentines on the southern side of these last foothills had even more extended loops, as if that were possible, and in the Sierra, going downhill usually meant: slow down).
Along the entire stretch, zigzagging across mountain meadows sparsely punctuated with dwarf firs, the arrayed peaks of the Gredos remained clearly in view, as if all at the same distance, on the upper periphery of one’s field of vision, no longer hidden by any range in between.
Also not another trace, except behind them, up on the Black Rock Pass, of a puff of mist or cloud. A clear winter-evening sky, although it remains uncertain whether the darkness forming the basis of the blue—no longer the “blueing” of that morning or afternoon—stems from the blackness of outer space, already perceptible in the high mountains, or from the impending night. No more smell of smoke, it having been drawn out of the bus up in the thinner, or finer, atmosphere; but also no more freezing and shivering.
On the sloping meadows, in contrast to the grazing places somewhat farther down, which tended to be deserted, there are herds of cattle almost everywhere, as well as scattered families of horses, the horses, like the cattle (many bulls), with coats so short that they look like a skin stretched taut over their bodies, for the most part as dark as coal: so a portion of the livestock from the mountains are not driven over the Sierra to spend the winter months in the much warmer and always snowless southern region, the valleys of the río Tiétar and the río Tajo beyond?
“Was it always like this up here?” wondered the driver, she who knew the Sierra inside out. “Yes, every time I came through here in wintertime, there were animals grazing, and only in the pastures here in the central region—but in no other year as many as are here now, and also—this, too, is new—as carefully and strictly guarded: around every herd and tribe a small team of herders with walkie-talkies—, as if in case of an accident.”
From the pass up above, she had still seen some of the mountain pastures on the southern flank below bathed in sunlight, a field of rays that visibly gave way to pitch-darkness—with an afterglow lasting but the twinkling of an eye—until only a single cow, separated from the rest of the herd in a dip below a ridge, had a yellow gleam on its flank, or was that part of its coat?
After sunset, a similar yellow, then reddish, then yellow-red-blue gleam on the clustered peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, far off against the sky. These might have been the central European Alps now, with the all too famous alpenglow on the snowy expanses in the background; and, to complete the picture, the clanging of the bells belonging to the cows and the bellwethers in the foreground and the veil of frost over the high valley carved out below, already shrouded in darkness, from which the thinly scattered lights of houses stood out, clearly nowhere dense enough to signal the presence of a larger village or town.
What was it that brought her back, time after time, as on the current evening, to this Sierra de Gredos, hardly distinguishable, especially now in wintertime, from the Swiss mountain ranges along the Italian and French borders, and whose highest peak, even the Almanzor, was hardly more than half as high as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, or the Matterhorn?
What in the world was she seeking or expecting in this mountain range without ski slopes or ski lifts, a range completely unknown outside the tableland area, known even in its own country only from hearsay as one got farther away from it, a destination at most for the inhabitants of the region, and perhaps also for those from Madrid? Weren’t even its principal types of rock, the granites, gneisses, and mica schists, the same as in the far more rugged Alps, which seemed to beckon with very different sorts of thrilling adventures, the only variation being that the Sierra ridges were older by so and so many millions of years, though not old in the sense of “phenomenal,” “rare,” “record-breaking,” or even “venerable,” but rather in the sense of “worn down,” “crumbling,” “cast off,” “written off,” in short, “aged,” in contrast to the still youthful Alps, in whose substrate something continued to stir, mountains that rose up year after year, pushed higher and expanded, while the Sierra de Gredos was steadily diminishing, eroding, shrinking, not quite perceptibly, but measurably, and someday, millions of days from now, would be hardly more than a somewhat elevated table in the tableland?
Why, if she was already taking a detour to seek out the author, did she not choose a more exciting one, especially one that would lead through sites of general interest or places where an audience was concentrated—whether the reading public or not—also a more contemporary area, that is to say, a more relevant, and, well, what the heck, a much, much longer detour than this one through the Sierra, which, properly speaking, was no detour at all—for instance, a detour in a great arc by way of North Africa to the author’s hole-in-the-wall in La Mancha, through the Mauritanian deserts, across the High Atlas in Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and heading inland across the Sierra Nevada, then the Sierra Morena, and finally the Sierra de Calatrava,
the “Death’s Head Sierra”—all landscapes she had traveled and hiked at least two or three times, and where she had had almost exclusively good, heartening, happy, and life-enhancing experiences, unlike here in the Gredos massif?
“It is true,” she said, continuing to talk softly to herself at the wheel and turning in her thoughts to her so faraway author: “Whenever I think of my previous hikes through the Sierra de Gredos, unless the familiar images come to me unbidden, I usually find myself recalling a borderline situation, not seldom one between life and death, or at least something simply unpleasant and bad. And yet, since that first time, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I have set out to cross these mountains almost every year and sometimes twice in one year, far, far more often than I have made my way through all these parts of the world where I was consistently filled with ecstatic feelings—no, not with illusory ecstasy but rather with a state of love, yes, of love, and of which I have only fond memories afterward. Whereas one time when I was on my way through here I found myself in the middle of a driving snowstorm, with flakes so wet and heavy that I could hardly breathe and was afraid of suffocating. I almost died of exhaustion. That was in January, like now—”
She corrected herself again: “No, that January it was the torrential downpour. Or was it a different January? No, the lost shoes. The snowstorm was in May—in the Sierra I always get all mixed up about time, and that is partly the fault of the Sierra de Gredos itself.—I had just been walking in the mountains in the May sunlight. I was walking as light-footedly, even with my knapsack, mochila in Spanish, mihlatuz zahr in Arabic, as a person can walk. As always when I am going somewhere on foot, I assessed my condition, the moment and hour, and my relationship to the world or to life, by whether I involuntarily spun around myself at least once as I went along.
“And the spinning occurred there again and again, as if at regular, predetermined intervals. Likewise I encountered from time to time, amid the short grass, some of which was still a wintry gray, sorrel, always growing in clusters, all fresh and green, and I repeatedly plucked a leaf and munched on it, and soon it was not merely against thirst but just because, out of contentment, and as if to savor and enhance the contentment with the sourness.
“I was already so high up in the Sierra that there were no longer any ravines to get around. Up to a certain altitude, just below the tree line, let us say, the Sierra is transsected by deep, narrow ravines, yet from a distance it looks so smooth and accessible, at least on the northern side. Yet instead of climbing straight to the ridge—calling it mountain climbing in the technical sense would be something of an exaggeration, since on the northern slopes, unlike the southern slopes, it is seldom necessary—I dawdled across the mountain pastures, devoid of ditches and almost entirely without trees, and also no longer fenced in every few feet, going gradually uphill for a while, then downhill again when I felt like it, and instead of having to wear myself out scrambling over barbed wire every few steps, now, imagine, I had to wade through or simply jump across a little brook that had just welled up and ran almost level with the rocks and the grass, and would not dig itself in until farther down, and on this meandering route toward the Puerto del Pico, the crossing to the south I had chosen for that day, you know, one of these bubbling-up brooks after another, also the rushing of these brooks along the ground, similar to my periodic turning-in-circles yet continuing without pause, in a seemingly preestablished and -determined order.
“I need not tell you what’s up with the passes and crossings in the Sierra de Gredos. And the Puerto del Pico, the north–south crossing, approximately in the middle, between the eastern and central massifs, is carved infinitely deeper and especially more steeply out of the ancient rock than most of the other notches, and can be seen from far away as a deep trough in the mountain range, which is oriented along an east-west axis and falls off sharply from the Puerto on both sides. And if there is a clear and classic border between north and south anywhere, it is there on the crest of the Puerto del Pico, the classic kind of north and south you read about.
“The southern air here, you should know, where it wafts in freely from the lowland, unhindered by any foothills, blows considerably warmer than in the other Puertos, and also with far more force and energy between the steep walls of the trough; it moves—not constantly, but on certain, not infrequent, days, at a specific time, usually at noon—right along the line of the northerly air, which up to this point has tended to hover there and remain cold, or even turn colder and colder in the innermost reaches of the mountains, and slips under it, while the northern air by contrast falls upon the southern air, and the result, as you can see back there to the left at the Puerto del Pico, is no longer mere huffs and puffs of fog and clouds with scattered snowflakes, but thunder and lightning, along with cloudbursts that unceasingly and mercilessly dump cold water over the landscape, refusing to let up before nightfall, and, somewhat higher, around the steep escarpments, snowstorms and blizzards, a sudden hurricane of flakes like the one in which I reached the pass that time in May when I was on my hundred-brook and thousand-sorrel-leaf trek.
“One step and I was out of the May sunlight, with a vista eastward across the open and obvious void to the Escorial and likewise westward all the way to the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, if not straight into polar darkness, then into the prepolar contourless fading of the light on the wintry Bering Sea; no driving snow, but a kind of spewing, and soon no longer individual flakes but an almost solid, suffocating, spongy mass, being hurled at me again and again, soon not snowy white, but deepening the darkness, except when sporadic, almost welcome, flashes of lightning lit up the air for a moment.
“And strange, and stranger still, that this becomes clear to me only now as I am telling you this story: how quickly I, who had been so filled with joy in life, my own, and in all existence, imagining that there in the treeless waste I could smell the June linden blossoms, from one bend of the knee to the next, was on the verge of giving up and being dead. Soon it will be all over with me, I thought. Just a few more steps, and I will not be able to do anything but let myself fall. And once I have fallen, I will remain lying at that spot and will not get up.
“The clumps of wet snow plunked onto the ground. The ground was vernally warm and along the foot of the cliffs already summery warm. But soon the snow stopped melting. It accumulated. It grew deeper and deeper, as rapidly as a brook flooding in a storm. Soon it rose above my knees. Then it was above my belly. I stumbled. Then I fell, or almost. I scrabbled along. You can still see me creeping along for a stretch, on all fours, half blinded, panting, whimpering, dribbling spit—and then no more spit.”
She interrupted herself. “I see you are hardly listening to me anymore. Your mind is wandering. I know you, my listener, my author, I mean: that is because I am telling the story in short, dramatic sentences. A narrative style like that can drive you away. And the kind of adventure that goes hand in hand with such narration—no, not hand in hand at all—has no validity in your eyes. According to you, any external adventure counts, and can be narrated, and is worthy of being narrated, only if it also elicits an internal adventure: when thanks to what befalls you, you are surprised at yourself, startled at yourself, or puzzled by yourself, or simply find some aspect of yourself strange, and thus discover a problem and ponder this problem, and describe it as your problem, or, no, an existential problem, in connection, of course, with the external adventure, so that now the external and the internal actually do go hand in hand, literally and in reality.
“In the course of that snowstorm at the Puerto del Pico, I once again found myself in the realm of the pasture fences, of which only the top strands of wire and the tips of the fence posts were visible. To get over them seemed to drain my last strength, but these obstacles also served as my reference points and provided a rhythm that each time yielded a bit more strength.
“The moment of ‘It’s all over!’ did not hit me until I was standing in the noontime darkness in front of a seemingly i
nsurmountable chainlink fence, as high as a house, that appeared to stretch forever in both directions, and when I then found the gate, it was secured with chains. Had I wandered through an invisible breach into the territory of an abandoned but otherwise intact mountain barracks that blocked any escape route, or a long since deserted Sierra prison (which in my case was again serving its original purpose)? Couldn’t I have turned around and crawled and crept back into the May sunlight?
“Yet stranger still, any turning back was out of the question, just as during the previous times in the Sierra when I had fought for my life there—and not just for an hour in a blizzard but one time for almost a whole day, and once for a whole lovelong, yes, lovelong, night—I could still have turned back at a certain spot, before the snake clearing, before the burned forest, but it was simply impossible that I, that anyone, that we, should have turned back, strange, so strange. When I came upon that chainlink fence, at any rate, I knew this was my point of no return. But that was when the transformation occurred, strange, so strange, of me into my brother, far off behind the walls of the penitentiary in the dunes—”
In her usual way she broke off her tale here before reaching the end and turned to her invisible listener: “Ah, you were about to drift away from me again into your absentmindedness. And not until that little word ‘we,’ and with it my brother, came into play did you prick up your ears again, and did your eyes, which had gone dull, light up. And I also know why my snowstorm story has so little meaning for you, aside from the fact that it seems to you too mired in external adventure: you, my listener and my author, dislike stories that deal constantly with one person, and in which only one person, alone and unaccompanied, does things, experiences things, moves about, even when this solitary person is me, the woman—which really should appeal to you, in that it first presents a surprise—a heroine familiar from entirely different images, all by herself and prostrate in the deep snow—and then a problem worth telling about. No, in my, and our, book you want to see me experiencing things in some sort of company—rather than alone this way—and described accordingly.