Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  Her first experience of the surprisingly populated mountain depression matched to a T the way her eyes had been opened to the world in the scene she had played at the end of her film. The world one experienced in Hondareda was virginal and bridal, yet equally, as one sensed the first time one gazed down into that camp in the hollow, a lost cause, or perhaps not? (For this sentence she again insisted on “one,” and when the author, who had long since left his father- and motherland for his village in La Mancha, hesitantly asked whether “bridal” and “virginal” were terms still used in German and suitable, she told him that what mattered was the adjectives’ relationship to the nouns, and in this case: yes!)

  By the way, she said, her story would have to return later to that upside-down hour, with the outbreak of insanity, that had occurred during her first journey through the Sierra de Gredos; for that had also become the hour of her guilt, and the fact that now, on this last, or perhaps not last? crossing, she had made up her mind, and, in the worst moments, intensely imagined, that she would speak of it at long last, had kept her from giving up and just letting herself fall, or perhaps not?

  On her previous adventurous journeys, she had encountered that virginal world not so infrequently—and again she interrupted the author and ordered him occasionally to replace “adventure” and “journey” with “roaming.” Almost every time it manifested itself, it had been when the roamer, or, in Spanish, la andariega or andarina, from andar, “to walk,” had stretched out somewhere in the open and fallen asleep, just as had happened in the film with the heroine she had played.

  Unlike in the film, she slept there, on the bank of a brook, in the steppe grass, under an overhanging cliff, only very briefly, usually for just a few breaths. And the falling asleep occurred in broad daylight. And it was never preceded by sorrow or despair, at most by a certain weariness from walking, a listlessness.

  Awakening from such a slumber, always accompanied by the rushing of water, the whistling of wind, and several times the more or less distant roar of a highway: not an easy awakening: as if poked by the forehead of an animal watching over her or some friendly creature. And also each time a scenery that, although unchanged, now seemed thoroughly unfamiliar and above all incomprehensible, without north and south, noon and afternoon—if any time, then morning, if any land, a land in the Orient.

  What freshness wafted toward one from this indecipherable setting. Except that it soon gave way to the tried-and-true familiar, and already the rejuvenation and the brideliness were wilted and dissipated. But in her Hondareda period this was not the case. She had never experienced anything similar.

  But then something comparable did come to mind. As a young woman she had often taken the train from her university town home to see her grandparents and her brother, still quite little, in the Sorbian-Arab village. Although the village lay in an almost flat landscape, before arriving at the railroad station, located a short distance from the village, the train went through a real tunnel. That got one’s attention, and not only the first time but every time, and even more remarkable was the length of the tunnel. Each time it seemed as though it would never end. What a long journey, with darkness to right and left, and in a tunnel on almost level terrain, too!

  When she traveled home this way, it was always evening already, if not night. And often she was tired, from being in the city or just in general. And as time went by, she would fall asleep in the tunnel, more and more often, and eventually every single time. And she fell asleep there even when she was not tired. The train had hardly entered the tunnel, at which it always more than doubled its speed, and its rattling and banging turned into a high-pitched whirring and whining, when her eyes would close and she, her body and her consciousness, and everything and everyone in the car with her, would drift along, while the iron wheels and rails took on a stronger and seemingly hardened rhythm between the very narrow tunnel walls, deep in the wide, hollowed-out belly of the dugout of the grander time. And: in the tunnel one man raped her. One? One for all.

  At the end of the tunnel, with the train’s sound now more distant again and softer, while the train slowed before reaching the station, she awoke. And every time, and with every repetition of the trip just as powerfully as in a fairy tale, she had the transformed-world experience. And unlike the times when she awoke as a vagabond with the sky above her, the awakening in and after the tunnel was lasting and reliable and above all valid. As a result of the tunnel, momentary, everyday experience, the mere present, was transformed and elevated into something of epic proportions. When one’s eyes closed in the tunnel, one saw afterward with much bigger eyes.

  And just as later, when she was in upside-down, downside-up Hondareda, surrounded by the summit plain of the Sierra walls, she had thought back then, at the sight of the entirely unadorned village, which, however, seemed after her tunnel sleep to be decked out as for a festival: “What has-beens, how superfluous we are. How played-out we are. What dream merchants and castle-in-the-air-builders we are. How lonely and lost we are.”

  And just as after the tunnel sleep her former home had seemed incomprehensible, so the Hondareda world seemed incomprehensible to her now, and from beginning to end: which did not mean that she was looking to comprehend it. For, just as when she awoke under the open sky after the tunnel, this not-comprehending-anymore was basically invigorating, and despite all one’s awareness of being a lost soul among lost souls, it gave one confidence, of a very strange sort. What? Was she, the boss, a lost soul? That, too, the story will touch upon later. And besides, she had long ago ceased to be a boss. Or perhaps not? Or all the more?

  There was almost nothing ordinary about the “mead of Hondareda,” one of the names as numerous as flower petals that had been coined for the glacial basin. So she stood there, and stands there, and will have stood there, one day looking at a sundial painted on a granite slab. It was not merely that it had no hands, and behind the shadow-dial nothing but a landscape in circular form, a miniature of the region: the sundial was located at a spot in the settlement that the sun seldom reached, and then only for moments, and besides, a granite cliff stood in the way of the sun’s rays: so that the sundial’s indicator cast its time-revealing shadow at most for a couple of moments.

  Similarly, right after her arrival there, beneath the mountain-blue sky, the zenith of whose great dome already hinted stormily at outer-space black, she had again been pelted, as earlier in Pedrada, from a broom thicket: except that this time, instead of stones it was almost weightless juniper berries, and, after another stretch, shiny red rose hips, not even as big as quail eggs, and, after a few more boulders, Sierra nuts, elderberries, and pine nuts. And it was not so much that she was pelted with these things but rather that they were thrown to her by persons who kept out of sight, in a high arc, as if she were supposed to catch them (which she then did).

  Likewise a brand-new, shiny bulldozer was suddenly parked there, surrounded by quartz and alabaster cliffs so smooth that one’s hand could not gain a purchase. And on another day, somewhere else entirely, far from the settlement, from the grainlike tall steppe grass, among which actual blades of wheat could be found, emerged freshly sieved sand cones as high as houses, in each one a weather-beaten rusty shovel, as if left there long ago. And the first, or third, or last of the original inhabitants of Hondareda—the observer had observed correctly—a man visibly stricken with years, was busy day in, day out, transporting boards on a small ladder wagon, back and forth, forth and back, sometimes also in a circle, without unloading them anywhere.

  Another Hondareda person clambered into the one crane in the place, which towered above all the rock spires on the floor of the basin, and stayed up there, motionless, in his cabin, sitting below the still arm of the crane, reading? watching? finally fumbling around, doing things with his hands that had no connection with the lifting apparatus, something like shaking a skillet, something like threading a needle, something like writing, with his nose close to the paper like a first-grader—wri
ting with his entire hand, his fist, meanwhile rolling his shoulders, throwing his head back, swaying his torso, and thus involving his entire body, or was this actually lovemaking, with his “partner” shielded by the cabin’s screen, and look, now he is gazing quietly out his crane window again, not moving a muscle, look how far away he is, and how, at fingertip distance, his iris iridesces and his pupils pulsate.

  And one day or night, or again and again, the roamer in the temporary Sierra capital must have pushed open one of the seemingly unoccupied wooden shacks, pushed aside the partition, and seen two lovers there, more real or in the flesh than anything one could imagine: there lay two people, very young, and the girl, the woman, was the most visible.

  She did not react in the slightest to the intruder, who in fact immediately took one step backward, but then became a spectator, wordlessly asked and invited to do so by the woman. As glistening as the girl lying there naked was (where in the world was the source of light in the dim shack?), the epitome of pride and surrender in flesh and blood, but especially in flesh, she seemed even prouder when she knew herself observed, and her surrender, becoming hard to define, transcending the person to which it pertained, the boy or man, appeared to be not merely somewhat but infinitely greater and more self-aware—will have appeared thus, appears thus.

  Enough of myths, this gaze said, this skin and this hair: enough of myths in which male gods descend on the woman in the shape of a cloud, a swan, a bull, a dragon, a billy goat, and the like; look at me: entirely different myths are in effect, and not only here and now, myths in which longing during absence and fulfillment during presence finally coalesce, and these myths are not made up out of whole cloth! A knothole in the shack opened into a spiral, and through the wide-open door the summit plain of the Sierra, peak after peak, the Mira, the Little Brothers, Los Hermanitos, the Little Knives, Los Cuchilleros, the Three Galayos, the Almanzor, the Galana, came riding in, one after the other. What were the two doing there? Was this even lovemaking? And the observer again understood nothing, nothing at all: and that was as it should be. Whatever the case: those two in the shack, copulating in such a creaturely way, majestically, displayed it to the world; displayed it to the universe.

  31

  On her property—the former stagecoach relay station and orchard—at the edge of the riverport city, she had once had an experience that presaged her interlude in Hondareda, an experience with a quince tree, known to her in one of the few remaining Sorbian words in her vocabulary as dunja, along with kwita.

  That year the quince, aka dunja, had bloomed, with its inimitable white blossoms, shaped like small, shallow bowls and gleaming from amid the dense, dull-green foliage, but then not one single fruit had developed. And nevertheless she went out to the tree every morning that summer, and then also in the fall, and looked to see whether there was not at least one quince, no, dunja. As time passed, here and there in the yard next door, so much smaller and more shaded, that ineffable dunja green, later yellow, appeared again, together with those rounded forms that surpassed any apple or other tree-borne fruit, and the shimmering fuzz on the surface. Only, in her orchard, no matter how often she climbed the ladder and poked through the leaves: nothing, and today again nothing.

  And nevertheless she had not ceased to be on the lookout and to search. Was it not possible that in the fork of a bough or elsewhere, concealed from sight, a dunja might be hiding? Yes, one day it would present itself to her eyes, a body, a curve, a fruit—with weight, volume, and fragrance among all the flat, odorless, and weightless leaves, which here and there were rounded, mimicking a fruit. And her looking would contribute to the fruit’s taking shape and its eventual appearance; would help bring forth the quince, the one quince on the tree. And if not, she, the experienced fruit thief, would simply take one from next door and attach it by a string or something to her tree—exclamation point!

  And then, one morning in late fall, when the foliage had become sparse, crinkled, and often blackened, with yellow spots like the special Almanzor salamander up here, from a distance her gaze, without being intent on anything for a change, unexpectedly—“out of the blue,” the author’s suggestion—behind, between, no, in front of, next to, and especially above the salamandrine spots, encountered a form, a ball no larger than a wild apple—which in that spot, on the previously so empty and barren tree, created a sphere in which the entire tree, without any wind, and with the dunja lancets at a standstill, strangely rigid in their wilting, at the moment when she caught sight of the quince (“So there!”) seemed to be turning. In this fashion a second and a third fruit then appeared, one more meager and nondescript than the next, and she left them all hanging on the tree, to shrivel and turn wintry black.

  And looking as a form of intervening, contributing, and inducing manifested itself again during her time in Hondareda, going far beyond such influencing of a plant. The observer had observed correctly when he spoke of the shapelessness or homeliness or chaotic ugliness of both the entire settlement in its layout and the individual hovels, “sleeping crates,” “pre-Promethean holes in the ground,” “termite mounds without termite architecture.” And yet he had not looked long enough, or often enough?

  Had he ever stepped over a threshold and eaten, lived, and so forth with the inhabitants in a sense fundamentally different from that in which some other, particularly assiduous, travel writers “participate in the natives’ lives”? Not once—although his reports do attest that everywhere entry had been silently refused to him, despite the absence of any visible, physical barrier-threshold in front of the living-holes; and as a result, he, together with the other members of his team, instead of crossing a threshold in Hondareda considerately and like a polite guest, had blindly forced his way in and remained blind to the spaces and conditions inside, or had he, or perhaps not?

  She, on the other hand, the unmistakably foreign woman—which did not mean outsider—discovered in this new settlement high in the mountains—which was a place of transition, and not only because of its proximity to the Candeleda Pass—a painstakingly worked-out, precisely defined, and, in the last analysis, positively artistic system of thresholds, or, in the inhabitants’ water-dominated vocabulary, locks? And once one’s eyes and all one’s senses caught on to this system, the apparently chaotic image of the settlement, seemingly mimicking the postglacial chaos of boulders scattered around without plan or rhythm, as well as the human habitations, acquired form (and forms) and relevance.

  True, it was a correct observation that each route into the colony took an inconvenient and seemingly illogical course, involving twists and turns, and going around bends that without apparent reason led one far from one’s destination; even a path or rocky trail to the neighbor’s place directly across the way followed a seemingly needlessly roundabout detour. But these detours had been there from the beginning, before the inhabitants settled in and constructed their dwellings, had been laid out after his arrival by one camper to the next: a sign and indication of the mutual commitment to preserving distance between oneself and others, a polite measure precisely in these cramped quarters, perhaps an even more distinct signal of giving one’s fellow immigrant a wide berth, intended as a salutation: “I mean well by you!”

  And it was from these original detours, established without much ado (or actually with much ado) between the new arrivals—perhaps prefigured for all of them in the human circulatory system—from this kind of both external and internal pre-tracery, then, that without much further effort the entire seemingly pointless network of diverging and deviating streets, alleys, and passageways had developed in the village of Hondareda.

  And with some variations the same was true of the individual buildings, or the natural features that had simply been adapted for living, storage, parking, cellaring: the caves, the holes and niches, the clay pits; and equally true of the now abandoned huts of the hermits, a succession of whom had followed each other to the basin over the centuries, huts that on closer inspection turned out t
o have been altered in all sorts of ways and only from above appeared to have caved in; and likewise true of the one-time “king’s refuge,” which only an outsider would perceive as a threatful (was that word still in use?) mountain fortress in ruins, and which, to be sure, continued to be marked on all maps of the Sierra by a small black triangle (= ruin), but in reality had meanwhile been rebuilt by the Hondarederos step by step as something else entirely, starting deep inside this obsolete castle, where, invisible to observers, a new cornerstone had been laid: as the seat of government of the—self-declared? nothing up there is declared, and precisely that is part of the international Hondareda problem—enclave, the seat of government hidden away in what still looks like a pile of stones and beams from the former royal refuge, and can be reached only with difficulty from the inhabited basin below: far, far removed from this government seat or center in the sky-high wilderness, at least sixty times sixty hammer throws or ten to thirteen sonic seconds away.

  No matter over which thresholds in the Hondareda region you step or let yourself be sluiced or carried into the center of the habitations, and not only the geometric center: everywhere you will find yourself enclosed by that sphere that categorically refused to be recognizable from the outside. Even in a mere shack, even in a culvert-like structure resembling a segment of a pipeline (which upon your entry turns out nonetheless to be heated and equipped with bull’s-eye windows like a cruise ship), you immediately encounter the quince, as it were, the dunja, both in the singular and the plural, the fruit; the flavor and color radiate from the living area into the other spaces, and out into the open.