Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  In similar fashion, the table, which took up the entire length of the hall, was not all of a piece. On closer inspection, one saw that it consisted of several tables, of varying heights and widths; here and there a door removed from its hinges, a plain board, even the roof of a car, all resting on sawhorses; a barrel, a chest-high library stepladder, a piece of a raft. This entire table was covered with empty fruit and potato sacks of a coarse material, true to a Pedrada tradition: as the innkeeper explained, this was supposed to assure good harvests in the coming year.

  What, harvests at such an altitude? Yes, hadn’t they seen the apple orchards? And the fields of stubble near the Peña Negra Pass? And Navalperal de Tormes, the pear-growing village? And up here, where oats, rye, wheat, and even peaches grew (the latter in sheltered spots) amid the cliffs and boulders, didn’t other crops flourish even more reliably—the patatas, potatoes, also known as krompire, or, in the Arabic still alive in many expressions, batatas?

  The story goes that during that evening meal no one spoke while others were speaking, or interrupted anyone else. Only one person spoke at a time, and all the rest, even those way down at the other end of the table, listened; apparently no one had to raise his voice, and the rattling of the generators outside actually served as a kind of sound carrier.

  As the story tells us, the first to begin to speak was the former Friulian or Argentinian magazine writer. And at the same time it was clear that everyone would have a turn to address the others during the time they spent together. Without blushing, the young woman, instead of looking around while speaking, gazed directly at the person who had been the subject of her magazine piece years earlier.

  What she said, however, was not meant only for the ears of the powerful banker, or whatever she was, or had been. We are told that she probably fixed her eyes on this person because her face was the only one she recognized in the gathering, and even more because she believed, no, was convinced, that she would come to know this person, encountered unexpectedly and, what is more, in a decisive, yes, decisive location, set apart and remote from the places familiar to the two of them, in a decisively different way, yes, decisive from this day on, just as she, speaking here in a foreign setting and teetering on the edge, would show herself in an entirely different light to her former interviewee, as well as to the others and to herself.

  As she spoke, she occasionally twisted a rusty tin can that stood in front of her, filled with a bouquet of dog-rose canes covered with fruit, red as only rose hips can be; while the speakers coming after her twirled in the same fashion rock crystal vases, jade goblets, old beakers missing their caps and handles, discarded baby bottles, ink wells, tin tea caddies, bronze mortars, and so on, while in each of these “vases” were the same bright rose-hip-red rose-hip bunches, which, according to the bus-driving tent-innkeeper, had been used for centuries in the Sierra de Gredos to ward off melancholy or to protect one against snow-blindness, a life-threatening danger especially for those crossing the mountains now in the winter months, and emphasized in the guide to local dangers. Like the rest of the company, the pale young woman had not changed for dinner. And likewise everyone’s hairdo had remained the same.

  And nonetheless she looked, as did those next to her, as if she had not come there from the present, or rather, only from the present. Without being in costume or dressed up, with the possible exception of the “emperor” or “king” or whatever he was—but was that really a costume?—they sat there as if at a time boundary, on the one hand clearly in the current era, and on the other hand, in the next moment and breath, perhaps even more clearly and distinctly in a second era, from which a curtain had been suddenly raised behind one, not a bygone period, not a historical one, also not one at odds with the present or a merely imaginary one: no, a period as undefined as undefinable, one that existed in addition to the current one, a present offering expanding possibilities and all the more real or tangible.

  This new era found its clearest image in the persons of the adolescent couple and their small child. They sat there, as one can sit there only now, in the moment, on a winter evening, quite high in the mountains, with flushed cheeks, tired yet intermittently wide awake (the woman who had commissioned the book rejected the expression “full of beans” proposed by the author): also very contemporary, she with yellow and green streaks in her hair, he with blue and silver streaks in his, both of them wearing their hair cropped short, both of them wearing an identical single tiny earring, of aluminum or some such—and the next moment this very up-to-date couple, moved as it were (“Strike ‘as it were’!”) into a new dimension, distant and deep, out of sight and at the same moment unexpectedly close—“something artificial and virtual images can simulate only feebly and deceivingly”—were vouchsafed an additional present, incomparably stronger and above all more durable than the previously mentioned presents, which nonetheless also remained in view, “and the durability of this image in comparison to a virtual one is like that of infinity to zero!”

  She then tried to explain to the author that a splendid present like this, “beyond any doubt the most splendid possible,” in the image of the youthful couple, had its origins, among other things, in the distance between them as they sat there, a distance not entirely usual “nowadays”: “This distance between her and him was now, and more than simply now.”

  And, as she explained, part of it was that both the boy and the girl held themselves remarkably erect, their torsos, necks, and heads, one the spitting image of the other, and likewise hardly turning toward each other, each of them constantly looking straight ahead, their eyes focused on the rearmost horizon of the tent hall, yet “not at all” fixedly, and their upright, erect sitting beside each other was remarkable not in the sense of “strange” or “weird,” but rather in the sense of “noteworthy” or “wondrous” or, yes, “moving”: “first re-presenting” that which was present.

  Accordingly, she said, the young couple, together with the infant, who chewed alternately on his mother’s and his father’s finger with his first teeth—they allowed it without wincing—seemed to be inside yet another tent, an invisible one, not measurable but just as, yes, just as substantial as the one of mud and wood, as the ones of tent material or whatever.

  She went on to mention that this scene suddenly brought to mind the only remaining photo of her parents, killed in an accident: the two of them likewise almost still children, long, long before her birth, during or shortly after the end of the war, side by side, ramrod straight, sitting on a felled tree trunk at the edge of a clearing near the village, and, in addition to their similar way of gazing into the distance, dressed almost exactly the same, as far as fabric, pattern, and cut went, as the couple here with their very trendy hairstyle and -color—“timeless”—neither urban nor rustic, and certainly not in folk costume (Sorbian or any other)—simply white and black—which had nothing to do with the fact that the photo was in black-and-white. And just as every time she envisioned her (future) parents as perching there together in a prewar period, contrary to the facts, now in the present she saw their two revenants (“not at all returned from any kingdom of the dead”) the same way.

  And drawn into this present, perhaps preceding a war but on this night even more tangibly peaceful, was the “itinerant stonemason,” having seemingly drifted there like a ghost, previously on the carretera and then, upon entering the tent-inn, from some medieval period, and likewise the “first and last local and pan-European emperor,” as if on the way to a son-et-lumière spectacle, in the park at Aranjuez, let us say, conceived as the crowning event in the annual historical reenactment there, carried over the Sierra in his legendary litter to his final resting place, together with his entourage: all of them, though seemingly disguised and their bodies transported by their disguises to a distant, dusty, dilapidated past, which no living images could revive (they least of all), protruded from their earlier time—if they indeed came from some such—with their shoulders, necks, and heads, into a present as
vivid as any, and next to this one the current present seemed dimmer than any allegedly dark past.

  “Sometimes I have the same sensation,” the author is said to have replied, “when I see portraits of people from earlier centuries, paintings, copper engravings, woodcuts: initially the faces usually look not only remote in time, but also entirely foreign, alien, incomprehensible, belonging to a human type diametrically opposite to me, as a man of today, but as I gaze at them, they often come alive for me as wonderfully approachable, colorful, lively beings, such as are now revealed to me in my daily surroundings only at sacred, or rather blessed, times. Goodness gracious!”—Her reply: “That evening only one person was entirely rooted in the present, in nothing but today. But I do not want you to have him appear in our story until later.”—The author: “A photographer?”—She: “Yes, a photographer, among other things. But how do you know?”

  The earlier writer of the magazine story, constantly turning toward her earlier heroine, began to speak and revealed herself as follows: “Once I was a friend of other people’s stories. Fui una vez amiga de historias ajenas. At least I played that role, or wanted to play it, or had to play it. Now I know nothing of others anymore, and have no desire to know anything, and above all do not pretend to know anything about this person or that or about you. No sé nada. I know nothing.

  “And I am no longer a friend of knowing about others’ lives. No soy amiga de saber vidas ajenas. How alien, cold and abruptly alien, clearly alien for all time, every person, in truth, appeared to me from the outset, men as well as women, also children, closer relatives as well as much more distant ones, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, once to three times removed. Especially the aunts and uncles, the nephews and nieces. How incomprehensible people appeared to me, and how little I understood how anyone could describe another person, tease out traits, characteristics, and idiosyncrasies, and knit them into an ostensibly recognizable figure. What I perceived instead was a cloth doll. Even when someone did this only in the presence of one other person, even when I recognized the person being described, or thought I recognized him, it seemed to me that the whole thing was a swindle, and that even a—what is the term?—lifelike description of a person was simply not right, was indecent, presumptuous.

  “Just as there is a prohibition on images that is rooted in our consciousness, or in instinct, above all in respect to the human face, it seemed to me that there was also a sort of prohibition on description, again where the human face was concerned.

  “And all the more so when the describing no longer occurred only in the presence of one other person but in society! And all the more so when it became public! And all the more so when it was done in writing, in an article or even a book! And why did it have to be me to whom all the individual strangers became even more alien, if possible, in descriptions, or ceased to exist altogether!—the pseudo-descriptions and imitations, especially those considered most successful, had the most devastating effect—why did it have to be me who came upon or stumbled into a profession or business whose stock in trade was public description, captured in black-and-white, of individuals, of ‘people’!

  “If it had at least been a question of capturing a nation, or of people in the aggregate. Human masses and crowds were alien to me, too, but alien in a different way, at least sometimes, not as indescribably foreign as all the nine hundred ninety-nine individuals whom I pried loose and nailed to the page, from the color of their eyes, to their gums, to their shoe size, to their way of walking, shaking hands, brushing the hair back from their forehead, their voices, the shape of their ears, the shape of their chins, their shoulders, their furniture, their pets, their gardens, their vehicles, their preferences, their recurring dreams, their perfume, their failed suicide attempts, their hidden guilt, their forbidden love, their secret ambition in life.

  “And even when all the details were correct, and as a rule they were, I knew that my descriptions, my descriptions of people and persons, were nothing but a deception and a distortion. How did I know that? I just knew it. I knew it if for no other reason than that every detail had to be striking. There was no demand for a detail that was not striking. I knew it? My disgust knew it, my disgust at describing your lips, your skin, your nostrils, your way of driving a car, your way of crossing your legs, or not, as the case might be, of opening the door for others, of keeping your eyes closed for a long time, of remaining constantly attentive, of reading people’s lips and eyes, of suddenly clenching your fists, of striking your head with your fist. My disgust at describing, and then at you and at me.

  “But now that I no longer need to find anything striking about my subjects, now that I do not need to publish such things, these people have become a tad less alien to me, and above all alien in a different way. Now that I no longer pretend to be a friend of others’ lives, to understand them, to write and put in circulation true stories about them, I have begun to discover a new world. Now that I do not need to know anything about you—now that I no longer have to focus on someone as the subject or object of a story that must be written, I know that I can be more open with you, with him—” (turning toward the stonemason) “before him—” (turning toward Carlos Primero, alias Charles V) “before all of you—” (opening her eyes and taking in all the others at the table at a glance) “more open in general.” (With each gaze now, and now, and now, a blushing deeper than ever before, as if on the verge of a great anger or some other powerful emotion.)

  “Only now, with my fundamental ignorance, my ignorance as my foundation—heaven knows, facile paradoxes and plays on words still crop up from my story period!—instead of writing about you, I could write you up, write you off, write around you.

  “And I was never as frank as tonight in Pedrada, here in the innermost Sierra. I sense, I know, that today I could discover you, you and you, and all of you, instead of revealing this or that about you, guessing, and putting it into a false context. During the bus ride, with the first rotation of the wheels, everything I had known about you earlier was already canceled—no previous life, no roles, no position, and in its place the desire to discover you, to tell your story again in discovery mode, the very opposite of the scoop that was once my first commandment.

  “Except that now I no longer write, not out of disgust at writing, at writing implements, at paper, at the computer. My not-writing-anymore comes from a sort of lightheartedness; giving up writing has left me more light of heart and friendly. And now that I keep my hands off anything remotely connected with script and texts, I see that I am, in fact, yes, fact! a friend of others’ lives. The more alien your life, your lives, the more open I am to them.

  “And how strange our story seems to me, precisely here; ¡Soy amiga de vidas ajenas! ¡Soy amiga de historias ajenisimas! Mi emperador, let us see a few moments of your unknown story. And you, you are not really the banking empress I once had to interview across three continents, are you? Or you are no longer that? Ah, goodness gracious, I still have all these questions. But at least they are only spoken and are not intended for publication.”

  Now the response of the woman to whom these remarks were primarily directed: “And you ask different questions now. For I recall how in the old days you talked almost constantly, always in the same soft, childlike voice. But simultaneously, gazing into my eyes with your own large eyes, you were ready to pounce. You were intent on trapping, catching, pinning down—not necessarily me as a person but a predetermined, predictable, printable—what was the word I used at the time?—scenario, extending beyond me to a situation, a state of affairs, a current issue. You also talked constantly about your own stories, worries, dreams, adventures, including your adventures in love, perhaps not entirely made up on the spur of the moment—for the purpose of worming corresponding confessions out of strangers.

  “Not even for a brief second were you free of suspicion. The suspicion implicit in your questions was the very foundation, the basis of your profession, and once your suspicions were confirmed in one
way or another, you stripped me, and all the others, of my, and their, little and not-so-little secrets and then left us there, the way a pickpocket, or rather a nest-robber, leaves his victims, even if the word ‘victim’ is not entirely appropriate? No, it is. And what are you living on these days? How are you earning your living now that you have given up describing people?”

  The fellow passenger: “For a while it was an important piece of information in a story whether a person had money, and where it came from, and so on. But for this story of ours, this evening’s story, that has become irrelevant.” Did that mean that she was in on the undertaking?

  And the lady banker, replying only now to the question posed at the beginning and showing her hand: “It is true. Or at least it is likely that my banking days are over, and not only since this evening. It seems to me that all of banking is in a bad way, and not only since today. Yet I know that the core of my profession remains sound. It embodies, and continues to be, an idea that is not merely useful but essential. And this idea is almost unique, in that it pertains entirely to others, my contemporaries, and it can be summed up thus: being a big wheel. Wheeling and dealing. The banker as a trustworthy driver, with both hands on the wheel, moving other people’s money. Showing forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, forestalling. Launching initiatives. Managing. And primarily seeing to it that you, my contemporaries, have time; that you do not waste your time worrying about money, hoping for profits and dreading losses.

  “At present, however, a person in my profession manages less than he gambles. We gamble, and we gamble whether we want to or not. We are forced to gamble with money, with numbers, with products, with the markets. If our activity previously may have included an enjoyable element of play, in the form of an element of adventure—no, not of adventure, simply of entertainment—our work now consists of an excess of gaming; of gambling for profits, a compulsion to gamble for profits.