Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  She was dressed for the nocturnal crossing of the Sierra as at the beginning of her journey. Only a few small things had been added, a chin strap for her hat, knee pads, a juniper walking stick, which, when one waved it in the air, produced a hissing sound. Stuck into her belt—not her hat—were the feathers of various birds, each one a singleton, dropped as the birds took flight, a gray-blue-white one from a wild dove, a tiger-striped one from a falcon, a shiny black one from a jackdaw, a dull brown one from a vulture, a feather bordered in ultramarine but otherwise transparent from a blue jay, a kite feather partly dusted with gold. Sewn onto her garment everywhere were little pieces of mica, which—according to the intermittently superstitious people of Hondareda—were supposed to ward off lightning and protect one from fire: from her clothing, as otherwise from the mica-strewn ground, there now came a reflection of the night sky, and not all that dim; and from the fringes of her jacket sleeves dangled smooth little granite pebbles, which constantly bumped against each other in an even rhythm as she walked.

  If “Gredos” came from the word greda, meaning clay, or potter’s earth, or scree, or grit, the steep southern slopes of the Sierra deserved the name more than the northern ones, which consisted almost entirely of solid rock: for her descent repeatedly took her across stretches of soft, almost muddy earth, also slate scree and gravel, where she sometimes slid more than walked; a sliding which, because she was always prepared for it, instead of carrying the risk of slipping and falling, was used by her for making more rapid progress, a sort of riding down the mountain.

  The rucksack also helped her maintain her balance. The expression she used later in conversation with the author was that it was “nice and heavy,” for one thing from the fruit she had pilfered before setting out—her own form of superstition?—and then somewhat less from the almost feather-light bread than from the olive oil that had proved its worth on all her previous crossings, and the large container of salt: the salty air that had unexpectedly reached her nostrils up on the crest along with the suddenly mild southerly wind—did it emanate from the salt that her body, heated from the climb, caused to steam? Or did the salty cloud come from her body itself? The only other provender she had—yes, she assured the author, he could be so bold as to use this word—were the mountain walnuts, the hazelnuts, the chestnuts, and dried rowan and juniper berries, which she constantly jiggled in her various pant and jacket pockets, making them click and jingle.

  “Time is money?” she said out loud in the darkness, which grew denser as she descended: “Yes, but not the way most people think. No one has established yet what wealth one can acquire by means of time. I have time now, and nothing else has ever made me feel freer or wealthier. Yes, and having time is definitely a feeling and has nothing to do with leisure or a sense of leisure. It comes from inside and is added onto whatever I am engaged in at the moment, and it alone provides a sense of completeness and meaning or specialness. Listen: having time is the overarching? no, the basic feeling that first makes possible the other feelings, the specific and also the grander feelings, that is to say, the more warmhearted feelings and life on a grand scale.”

  Talking to herself in the dark: Was she afraid on this solitary descent? Forget that question—anything resembling fear was out of the question for the asendereada and her story; and besides, where she was at the moment, far above the tree line, it was not pitch-dark, for the spatially pliable chiaroscuro still held sway, in which she even descended backward at times, with her eyes fixed on the Sierra mountaintop, which was noticeably receding from her—while, strangely enough, the lowlands and the plain below were also receding, even though she was nearing them, step by step, probably also receding because the only lights, those of Candeleda, had soon been swallowed up by the foothills and low ridges, leaving not even a pale shimmer in the sky.

  But if no fear, what about the skittishness typical of her tribe or village or ethnic group? “That was out of the question during this nocturnal crossing,” she told the author. “Besides, it had never reared its head on all my previous solitary crossings of the Sierra. Was it the evenness, the rhythm, or the constant state of alertness? At any rate, when an entire forest of bushes, which a moment ago had been completely motionless, began to sway, advancing toward me like a huge black wave, I stepped out of its path as if nothing were wrong, and in fact it was only a herd of cattle, of the deep-black Ávila breed, which had been sleeping in the patch of bushes and had all stood up at once.

  “And time and again, when I slid past snakes at a thumb’s and a throat’s distance, after slipping, which happened to me more often in broad daylight than in the dusk, I merely observed them wide-eyed, like the sharp horns of the bulls poking out of the foliage, and my only thought was: Well, well, aha.

  “The startle response that comes when one trips and almost falls, or falls off something, is entirely different. I experienced that constantly during all my crossings of the Gredos massif, except during the last one, when I actually would have welcomed it after a while: for the shock that goes through one when one thinks one is losing the ground under one’s feet merely affects the body, and puts it on a particular kind of alert: afterward one sees more clearly, hears more distinctly, and, most important, a person who has been ‘pulled up short’ this way, as our village expression has it, at once shakes off any brooding or self-absorption.”

  In the previously mentioned “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”—which she knew almost by heart, as if she had literally written it herself, the descent from the ridges at the summit to Candeleda, at the edge of the valley of the río Tiétar, was described as “extremely challenging.” One was advised not to try it alone, or at night. On the other hand, the descent was said not to take more than “approximately six hours,” and “as the crow flies” it was a “mere fifteen kilometers.”

  Yet she found the descent to be not challenging at all, or at least that was not the proper word for this journey on foot. Nevertheless, the asendereada needed not six hours for the descent to Candeleda but the entire night, and the entire following day, and another night? and when she finally reached the fig and olive trees on the edge of the small town, in the darkness before dawn, or after dusk? she had lost more than just a day and a night. Lost? Really?

  In his youth the author had occasionally read one of his attempts at epic literature—he had always been intent on achieving epic breadth, without being familiar with the term itself—aloud to a friend, male or female: and the first thing he always asked was whether it had been “exciting” (although even in those days, if the answer was yes, he was oddly disappointed, as if he had hoped to hear some adjective other than “exciting” applied to his creation).

  A similar mechanism was still at work now, when it came to the episode of the crossing of the mountain range, and he felt tempted to resort to the sort of dramatic style that he had eschewed all his life as a feature that would distract one from what was really happening. (That author who was apocryphal in this or some other respect, that twister of words and facts, who made things either better or worse than they were: that could also have been him at any number of junctures.)

  In a dramatic account, during that first night, shortly after reaching the tree line below and plunging into the pitch-dark, yes, pitch-dark first belt of woodland, the heroine of the story would have encountered a hermit and been raped by him. On the following day, as she lay, more dead than alive, in a thicket of ferns, giant toads would have crawled over her, spewing venom in her face. And the next night, as she stumbled around, half-blinded, she would have been attacked by a wild bull, which, had she not seized him by the horns, and in that position—with her hands gripping the horns!—hurled the story of her life at the bull’s head and into the bull’s eyes, would have fallen upon her in an entirely different way from the hermit monk of the night before.

  And like the heroine of a nineteenth-century English novel, for example, she would have taken refuge that second night in a hole in the ground,
surrounded by so-called fairy circles of mushrooms, to her mind always the most uncanny of plants, enormous, black-gilled mushrooms that glowed in the dark and beamed their disgusting odor of decay at her in the middle of the circle, their giant umbrellas having the form of black suns. And there was lightning and thunder. And an avalanche—in the southern gullies of the Sierra it was early spring, with a constant danger of avalanches, especially when the mild winds blew from the south—roared by so close to her that she felt its draft for a long time, like an ice-cold spray on her flushed face.

  And that one zone in the stretch of forest that had had a fire, where she had constantly stumbled over nothing but dead birds, all the cadavers close together, as if they had been blown there, the hawk with the mountain titmouse, the sparrow with the eagle, the wren with the sparrow hawk or hawk, and in all cases only their bare bodies—what had happened to their feathers? And that scene in a storm, as she cowered in a sheltering niche under a rock shelf, and little by little a fox, a viper, a scorpion, a salamander, a family of wild boars, a snow-white weasel, and even more animals that were otherwise mortal enemies by nature, had gradually joined her, and how they had all waited quietly and peaceably for the storm to pass. And one time, as she slept in a sitting position, the blow on the back of her neck.

  None of this happened during her descent from the Sierra de Gredos, or perhaps some of it did, after all, but under different circumstances, in a different light, and especially in a very different rhythm. She encountered drama at every step, whether walking, standing, or lying, but not of the cheap variety sketched out here.

  Accordingly, on that first night, in the first stretch of forest, a jungle-like tangle, she saw a fire flaring up in the pitch-darkness, though well contained in a circle of upended stones, and in fact she did come upon a solitary person, the only one during this phase of her journey, a nocturnal Jew’s harp player. And she asked him whether he wasn’t afraid, of what? of other people in this unsafe time and area, whereupon he—was this the rape?—looked at her with burning eyes and replied that he was never afraid, for “I love human beings” (yet the author, when she repeated this, word for word, so that he could write it down, looked at her as if in dismay; as if such a thing, both as a fact and as a statement, had long since become impossible and unthinkable; dismayed? disarmed?). The hermit had exuded a strong smell; he smelled of having gone astray.

  And during the second night, as the asendereada was crouching somewhere, she in fact, almost literally, had her head knocked off. Yet the blow came from her own head, which, as she nodded off from exhaustion, struck her chest with practically lethal force: “One could have died of it, as if executed by the weight of one’s own head.” And it was also true that she lay in a ferny hollow for almost a day, “more dead than alive,” but without the “poisonous toads” that “crawled over her”—but what did this mean? wasn’t this a way of being truly alive for a change?

  How it came about that she then lay dying, as it were—no, leave out the “as it were”—and without anyone else’s doing, that was, or so it seemed, exciting enough to the author and reader caught up in the story—and exciting in a way that annoyed him less than those many stories that were written, and even more often filmed, as if “excitement” were the be-all and end-all—as if it were required nowadays that all books and films be exciting.

  Even the steep southern face of the Sierra was punctuated by granite ribs, rock spouts, and ledges, poking up amid the fallen rock and scree. As the woman passed them on her way down, for a while she was still so preoccupied with the settlement of Hondareda that she was repeatedly tempted to knock on one of the rock piles and step through a doorway as into one of the dwellings carved out of the former glacial trough. Except that these were no delicate chaos-rocks resembling houses or inhabited towers. For here on the southern flank there had never been a glacier. The topography was too steep for a gradual flow of ice. And where the author’s client had initially, just past the crest, wanted to push open the door to what she thought was a stone dwelling, the rocky ruins—not as rounded and polished as those of Hondareda—came from a peak that had gradually crumbled in some prehistoric era: parts had sheared off one after the other and hurtled into the depths, over the course of ten thousand or a hundred thousand solar years—until finally all that was left of the former mountain, at one time perhaps just as pointed and almost as high as the Almanzor, was the flat, slightly jagged rump, today’s ridge, the crossing point. The largest and heaviest pieces of that former mountain had fallen almost halfway to the valley, and stuck out in the middle of the steep slopes, in the form of spurs, onto which one stepped on the way down from the Sierra as onto an almost horizontal platform, easy to walk on and seemingly intended as resting places—whereupon one suddenly found oneself on the edge of a vertical rock wall, falling off into a veritable abyss, not a good idea to scramble down, at least not during the night.

  Time and again she knew she must turn back there—still that smile upon turning back? her smile glowing in the dark? and go slightly uphill again, until she finally ignored the spurs and the smoother stretches they seemed to offer, and in fact all apparent shortcuts. Better to stick to the reliable step-by-step serpentines through the trackless scree. She had everything she needed. She even felt increasingly enriched, “in the sense of being showered with presents,” as she described it. In contrast to all her previous crossings of the Sierra, where the moments of fulfillment—the sense of experiencing the entire possible range of existence, body and soul—had been pierced almost immediately with the pain of guilt at being farther than ever, infinitely far, from love and her loved ones, this time she did not see herself as alone, and at one point said out loud into the night: “I can do nothing better for you than to keep on doing what I am doing. In doing that, in doing it in rhythm, in a conscientious rhythm, without sloppiness, finding my own rhythm and getting it to vibrate, oscillate, and show the way, I am doing for myself and for you the best I can do, for myself and you.”—“What do you mean by rhythm?” (the author chiming in here).—She: “Intensification of what is already there.”

  And as she walked, climbed, and scrambled, there appeared to her for a moment, as briefly as a single snowflake flitting by before the real snow came, the old nursery in her house on the outskirts of the northwestern two-river city, lying there silent in dim light, where the toys lined up on the floor for a game were suddenly illuminated, then gone just as suddenly.

  That must have occurred at approximately the spot where the asendereada left the treeless, and also almost vegetationless, high-altitude precinct of the Gredos massif and began threading her way past the first Sierra pines, all of which along the edge of the woods were denuded, stripped of their bark and their tops by lightning. A lone star above one of the split crowns: an accessory, an essential one. But contrary to her supposition, it was not one of the stars forming the forehead of Orion, the central winter constellation. Indeed, there was no more Orion to be seen anywhere in the entire vast sky. Also no more Pleiades. No more Castor and Pollux. Not a single winter constellation left. No more winter? So that is how long we have been traveling together. A good long time. A swath of time. A wave of time. A hedgehog’s snout of time. A plane tree’s notched leaf of time. A bomb crater of time. And now, too, an expression from the Arabic book, this also flaring up like a snowflake or a falling star: “And the breath of the Merciful One wafted in from Yemen.”

  And now something squishy beneath the hiker’s sole, a sinking into something soft: a piece of a garment? an entire garment? a garment shrouding a decomposing corpse, stretched out there on the forest floor, already half transformed into a cadaver, gelatinized?

  No, the softness came only from the fabric and the thick moss growing all over it. And the fabric? Was, and is, that shawl or stole we had lost during the previous crossing of the Sierra de Gredos, a year or five years ago, and had been determined to find this time. Is such a thing possible? Yes, it is possible. “And we will not lose y
ou a second time, my shawl!” she said, as she involuntarily traced the word “shawl” in Arabic letters in the night air (it was the same word).

  37

  She walked. We played. And our playscapes extended far beyond the four walls of your nursery, farther and farther beyond. At every step a playground, a playing field, a play space, and one followed the other; followed on its heels; went hand in hand with it.

  And this succession of spaces also presented itself as a succession of settings—for what? what was set there? what happened there?: where the spaces themselves were the happening, the game, the spectacle. And the places through which she was walking alone now formed trails and fords and passageways and walkways and tunnels to the locales, the same ones or others, of once-upon-a-time: where we two—did Arabic, like the Slavic languages, have a dual form, between singular and plural?—had been at one time, or had passed through: every few steps, these places in the Sierra turned out to be augmented by settings from her childhood village, from her school and university towns, from megalo- and metropolises, but more often by settings off the beaten track, remote places where she had once been with another person, or with several people who had become close friends, and at the same time will have been—this is how clearly the places, sites, and spots of the past that were played into her hand presented themselves.

  And each of these once and future settings, here and there (she demanded that the author avoid the term “place images” or even “image” for this stage of their joint story and use it only at the end, if at all), revealed a pivot and a hinge, a connecting element that allowed it to pass into the following setting, to continue turning the stage and the page to the next.