by Peter Handke
Not one ordinary house still inhabited in Pedrada. Or did it merely look that way when one arrived by night? And all the houses, including the barns and stables, in ruins: another nocturnal-arrival apparition? And if ruins: Hadn’t those already been here the very first time she came?
What was certain at least was that except inside the tents no light was burning in a building. Across the entire high plateau the rattling of generators, but as if one of these sounds muffled the other, almost swallowing it up. And was that music in the tents? Were people singing? Or did the hubbub of voices outside, merging with the roaring and rumbling of the various watercourses, create the impression of voices and instruments sounding in unison?
In quick succession some surprising and unexpected aspects of Pedrada, seemingly so remote. Satellite dishes mounted on the tents? A paperboy making his way from tent to tent, with the next morning’s papers? An Asian, or also non-Asian, deliveryman heading at full speed with bouquets of roses toward the main tent, the converted inn called At the Sign of the Red Kite II?—Listen, let me tell you: no, no paperboy, but perhaps, yes, definitely, a pizza-delivery boy, younger than young, swerving out of the darkness on his motor scooter, zooming back and forth, still unsure of the address for his delivery, finally, in his confusion, asking for directions, and whom did he ask? whom else but her, just arrived in the village—every time she is the one, she of all people, whom local folk approach for information when she is in a strange place—and promptly sent on by her, buzzing off, only to come to a halt around the next nocturnal corner, utterly at a loss, with his pizza box strapped to the rack on the back of his scooter.
And right after that, on his way to the main tent, the daytime roamer, the stonemason, with his tools dangling from his belt, who back on the carretera did not board the bus but wanted to continue on and on, on foot: so he, the pedestrian, reached Pedrada before her with the bus, and slips into the tent ahead of her.
And already as they were pulling into the village, the regular driver, having regained his strength and, sitting upright in front next to her in a long, lightweight fur coat, seemingly whisked there by magic, holding his Labrador by the collar, inseparable from him, pointing out the parking lot to her, an orchard—so in the meantime such a thing existed even up here in the mountains—and later clearing a path to the inn-tent for her and the other woman through the nocturnal throng of pedestrians in the semidarkness, and once inside leading the two of them straight to the quarters assigned to them for the night, transformed from a bus driver, a role he was playing perhaps only for the day, into the administrator of the yurt village and the district.
And on the way from the bus, now parked in the orchard next to another that resembled it like a twin, the other woman traveler identified herself as someone who had accompanied her once before, and actually for a not inconsiderable length of time, for days, indeed—memory now chimed in—for weeks, not on a journey, but rather from workplace to workplace, from appointment to appointment, from outskirts to downtown and back again, to write the cover story on her for an Italian? Brazilian? magazine—the heroine of the feature no longer remembered which—but now, walking somewhat behind her and addressing her back, explained: she was traveling the Sierra on her own this time, not as an author, let alone as a journalist, which she had been, by the way, only for a while and for the purpose of earning a living, and she had intentionally not brought any of her professional tools with her on this journey, neither her computer (she said ordenador) nor her hand telephone (portable)—besides, there was “no service” for the Pedrada region, at least at the moment—not even a notepad and pencil; in fact, she had set out for the Sierra without any luggage, any encumbrance, so as to forget how to speak and in fact forget all her languages; whereupon a memory image of this former author finally came to the woman to whom she was speaking: the image of a terribly young woman always tottering along on high heels, constantly blushing, with tears forever welling up in the corners of her eyes for no apparent reason, the image most sharply focused on the wheel-less suitcases, weighing a ton, and the equally heavy gear bags dragging down both her shoulders, all of which she had hauled from a great distance, if not from far-off countries, to their fleeting rendezvous, and always without help, always “alone” (in the sense in which a woman in her land of origin, when company arrived unexpectedly or a telephone call came and she had a man with her, would say defensively, “I’m not alone just now”).
And on the basis of the image she turned to face the other woman, now following in her footsteps with hands completely free: how “terribly young” and “alone” the woman, the girl, still was, and yet how small, how tiny she appeared in the current surroundings, out in the orchard as well as inside the hotel tent, although today, too, she was wearing high-heeled shoes, but this time more sturdy ones: “My God, you’re so little!” said her former feature-article heroine, in a hoarse voice and clearing her throat, as if for her, too, this were the first time she had spoken out loud this day; and this exclamation, furthermore using the intimate form of “you,” uttered by her, who in the past had never exchanged a personal word with this writer, expressed a friendliness surprising even to the speaker herself—sounding entirely different from the way “My God, she’s so big!” would have sounded—conveying immediate affection, after which she grabbed her fellow traveler under the arms, as if to confirm that she was really walking along without luggage, with hands and arms free, this woman to whom she had extended only the tips of her fingers back in the days when they met in major cities.
Ultimately one was most surprised there in Pedrada, in the innermost reaches of the Sierra de Gredos, by oneself, above all by the way one interacted with others, for instance with this woman whom one knew more or less, or hardly at all, from the world outside: by the words and gestures that became possible when one met, words and gestures unthinkable “out there in the world,” and by how matter-of-factly they came out of one. Did these expressions, of which one would previously have considered oneself incapable, perhaps have to do with the so-called remoteness of this place? And also with a shared sense, perhaps imagined, of vulnerability? And what did “remote from the world” mean?
The individual sleeping quarters in the Milano Real II consisted of tents inside the tent, arranged more or less in a semicircle at the back, along the walls of the mother tent; not made of wood and clay like the big tent, but of classic tent material, though not of one in common use; each one—there were only a dozen such “tent rooms”—in another color of the spectrum, from which the little tent also got its name; and instead of being conical or pyramidal in form, cube-shaped, except for the concave back wall, which at the same time was part of the wall of the main structure.
She had never seen and touched a material like that of her tent chamber, dubbed “Orange,” or Burtuqal. Completely opaque from the outside, although a bedside lamp was lit, from the inside the material allowed one in some places to see the neighboring tents and especially the front part of the tent inn, which was left free of smaller tents and was several times larger than the sleeping area in the back.
For a moment she thought she was at home in the riverport city, in her office, likewise located way at the back of the floor for top management, where, without having been visible herself, she had been able to follow the goings-on in the open-plan office outside through a wall of one-way plate glass instead of a cloth wall. (“Had been able to”? “having been visible”?: Did this mean that all that was a thing of the past? over and done with forever?)
The tent material somewhat resembled a patchwork, though without detectable seams; in one place it felt like brocade, in the next like jute, in the third like silk, and in another more like a man-made fiber, with what seemed like temporary patches here and there of plastic or even waxed paper. Although it would have been possible for her to look outside through the holes, tears, and slits that seemed to have been made intentionally in the rear wall of her night-tent, forming a sort of aperture and at the
same time delicately chiseled ornamentation, she decided instead to survey the neighboring sleeping tents and the wide interior space under the dome of the main tent. After this day of being in constant motion, almost always with very distant horizons up ahead, she did not want to see any more of the world outside; did not want to have to see anything outside the walls of the inn; also did not want to set foot that night outside the curtain at the entrance to the tent.
But certainly to look through the cloth walls: at the likewise opaque tent walls to her right and left, which allow one to sense a forehead leaning against the material or a fist being clenched—this one called “Violet,” or Banafsadzi, the sleeping place of the former magazine writer, still blushing blood red; the other one, “Gray” or Aswad, where the hiker or stonemason who refused a ride is sleeping; and looking straight out at the great hall, as big as a barn, or the barn as big as a hall—the area in front of the semicircle of rooms is in fact something between the great room of an inn and a threshing floor—empty except for a long supper table, extending from one mud-and-wood wall to the other, set with dishes in some places, cleared in others, and in places crowded with useless stuff.
Nothing else but these many tables, pushed together along a ragged diagonal in the front portion of the lodging tent. And this area without any partitions: a single high, broad expanse, illuminated by lightbulbs dangling from the dome, which in the uneven flow of current from the generators sometimes glow, sometimes flicker, sometimes just splutter and intermittently go completely dark for a fraction of a second, and in this fashion give the impression of being constantly rocked back and forth by a draft (but aren’t the light fixtures actually rocking?).
No kitchen in the place; no sideboard; no heater; no reception desk (if El Milano Real Roman Numeral Two is even supposed to be a proper hotel); no credit-card stickers at the entrance or exit, or were there? that one, lone little sign there, a logo completely unfamiliar to her—and that was something—also faded and seemingly long since invalid, that particular card out of circulation, from a prehistoric credit-card era, so to speak, the emblem unrecognizable from a distance, even if she had eyes as sharp as the red kite.
The only place where the dining hall has other decoration is on the walls, at the same time forming the exterior walls of the structure. Hanging cheek by jowl on nails of all sizes, driven at random into the clay stucco and wooden ribs, on hooks, some of them bent downward, and on loops, are—not pots and pans but fire extinguishers (loose, not screwed to the wall), strikingly many of them; also guns (they, too, like the credit-card plaque, seemingly no longer current, but on the other hand no mere souvenirs, not decor, but ready for firing); first-aid kits and pouches (at least as numerous as the extinguishers); gas masks (these being the most numerous wall objects, from infant- to hydrocephalic-sized, a whole slew of them—was that expression still used?—a question thrown in by the Mancha-author, who had been away from the land of his mother tongue for a long time); and in between, there, and there! a stringed musical instrument, one unfamiliar to her, hanging by its strap, but for the most part wind instruments, trumpets and clarinets, and also an accordion.
And the floor of the inn-tent—only now does she take this in—is covered with carpets, some fairly shabby, partially covering a wild-strawberryred kilim or a peacock-blue Isfahan. And the man sitting motionless in one of the particularly dusky corners of the hall or barn or tent, seemingly waiting for the supper guests, in a collarless white shirt, ripped in places, and an all the more flawless waistcoat trimmed with silver braid under his ermine, is the same older man who was being carried in a litter over the old Puerto de Menga during the day, who reminded her of the emperador who centuries earlier was carried the same way to his place of retirement in the southern spurs of the Sierra de Gredos.
And the stocky dog lying at the threshold to the tent, on a particularly thick carpet, still belongs to its owner, the previous bus driver who is just now entering, but it is not stocky, but—only now will she have noticed this, through the wall of her chamber—pregnant (“One does not say ‘pregnant,’” she corrected her author, “one says ‘with young’”).
21
The bus driver or hotelier drummed the guests together for the mountain supper. In point of fact, he did not actually bang on a drum, nor did he blow one of the trumpets; he merely ran a bow over that one stringed instrument, over its single string, thickly plaited out of horsehair or whatever, moving the bow back and forth, forth and back, without stopping: a bellowing sound, in which the woman who alternately blushed and went pale heard a “sobbing,” while the other woman heard “an animal in heat,” a third person heard “the opening measures of a long ballad, which will accompany us through the meal and after that into sleep”—a narrative song that then did not materialize after all.
It was not only the three of them but almost a dozen who came, a few at a time, to the table under the dome of that high tent or barn, most of them from the cloth chambers, but also some from the outside.
It was also from the outside that the innkeeper brought in the food. There were several courses. What they consisted of in particular—as she indicated later to the author—was of no relevance to the story. “I contributed only a couple handfuls of the chestnuts I had brought along from the riverport city, a rare delicacy in the northern Sierra—strangely enough, some of them were already starting to sprout.”
But what did matter: that the dishes were brought in each time from the outside. One sensed, smelled, and tasted that they had been cooked in the open air, on outdoor fires; that local water had been used, from all those tributary brooks, one of them right behind The Red Kite, and the river they converged to form; and that the dishes were served almost the instant they were ready. Did not one row of tents in the village, the one directly on the Tormes, consist of fishermen’s tents, open on the side facing the water?
“Served”? No, they were wheeled in—by the chauffeur, aka innkeeper, who moved with the light-footedness found perhaps only in someone who but a short while ago had been lying there as if weighed down with stones—wheeled in on a four-wheeled serving cart similar to those that at one time—this story was taking place in an entirely different time—had been standard equipment in the state-operated hotels and restaurants of the communist states or countries of various stripes: the familiar squealing of the wheels, seemingly a thing of the past, even more piercing indoors on the carpets, on which the vehicle repeatedly got hung up, than outside in the alleys between the tents, but always audible there from almost infinitely far off as it approached the diners, creaking around innumerable corners, in that respect, too, a throwback to the achievements of the Eastern bloc or some other bloc that had hurtled into the pit of time.
Unlike the usual waitstaff in those days, the man steering the cart today hopped from one foot to the other as if in a surfeit of high spirits, dancing from guest to guest and serving each one with heartwarming delight.
And one’s heart needed warming. As in the glass bus during the day, throughout Pedrada, despite the tents, a persistent menace, growing from one second to the next, could be detected.
The fact that it was night, that no more low-flying planes and big-bellied helicopters were to be heard, nothing but a sporadic, almost outer-space-like, quasi-peaceful hum (could one still use the term “quasi”?), surely from an intercontinental aircraft, did nothing to assuage the almost universal feeling of defenselessness, of vulnerability, of teetering on the edge.
With the faltering of the generators, the lightbulbs kept going out and then coming on again with apparent difficulty (causing those dining beneath them to alternate between opening their eyes wide and squinting), which made for great uncertainty; the filaments in the bulbs, which they instinctively turned their heads to look at while engaged in the most enjoyable eating and most animated conversation (in spite of everything), appeared each time they met the eye as the fine, superfine, spiderweb-fine threads that they indeed were; which also suggests, howeve
r, that this sensation of being in danger was not the prevailing one and could be felt only on the edges of the group of diners.
From the very beginning, even before everyone had taken a seat at the table, a general exchange and mutual sharing sprang up in the center of the group, independent of the external uncertainty.
The emperador, or the actor playing the emperor in a historical film being shot just then in the Sierra, or whatever he was, had taken his place at the head of the table as one of the dinner guests. In spite of his ermine cloak, he was visibly shivering as he sat there surrounded by his bearers or fellow actors. His seat was an upside-down fruit crate, padded with an old automobile tire. His plate was of an alabaster- or quince-blossom-white porcelain, his cutlery, however, of plastic.
At the foot of the table, or the other head, the actual one, sat a small family, a very young father and even younger mother, barely even a teenager, and an infant with enormous blue eyes: their spoons, forks, and knives were of heavy silver, as if just fetched out of an old chest, while their plates consisted of fragments of earthenware held together with wire, and for drinking—the beverages also came from outside—the boy and girl, that is to say, the parents, had a single paper cup, with which they toasted the others, who raised their various coffee cups (with something other than coffee in them), crystal goblets, tin cups (like the drinking vessels in Westerns), athletic trophies, or entire bottles and the like to the youthful parents, he perching on a bus seat, still attached to its frame, while she lounged in a sort of choir stall, as if in a wing chair.