Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  Wasn’t this whirl of settings, from her own life and others’, contemporary ones and ones from hundreds of years ago, predestined for this section of her route and as if planned in advance for her book? Perhaps; but if so, not such a rapid whirl: with time less whirling than swirling like a meteorite and crossing its own path. And remarkable, too, that it happened as she was walking downhill, instead of uphill, as had been her previous experience, and at night instead of in the morning.

  A setting that came flying to her was the kitchen where her half-grown daughter, after they had located each other again (before she lost the child for the second time), was playing hostess, serving her (that had never happened before between mother and daughter and would never happen again in this way?) in that house by the Atlantic cliff near the small island town with the name “Los Llanos de Aridane”: yes, each setting and everything in the series passed before her, together with the terms for it, as the-signified-and-its-signifier.

  And almost with the same step there came flying to her the edge of a square in another small town (“Where, when, in the ring-around-the-rosy of places, names from now on are unimportant for our story,” she told the author), where the two of them again, the woman and child, had eaten at the end of a market day, and all that had happened was that they had sat there together in the otherwise emptied-out marketplace and that a strong wind will have been blowing, making the empty fruit and vegetable crates left behind from the market skitter all over the square, and that scraps of paper and plastic will have swirled around their heads, and that the sky above the square was, and is, and will have been pale gray.

  And with the next step, the two of them—in the dual, mi dva or some such—are driving home in the car on a rainy night, and all that happened was that during the entire trip tools, hammers, axes, pliers, together with apples or whatever, rolled back and forth on the floor of the car, and knocked against each other, and that the shadows of the raindrops on the windshield, whenever they were struck by the headlights of an oncoming car, dart across their clothes and faces in the form of dark, round spots, and that it is warm inside the vehicle.

  And a building that had once been a schoolhouse had a triangular gable with a relief in the middle representing an empty circle. And from a harvested cornfield far from the Sorbian-Arab village, a waterspout (an archaic term?) swept the chaff up above eye level and across the abandoned field in a column. And a caisson pulled far ahead of us along a cemetery’s main avenue, and the autumn leaves drift down around it. And on the railroad embankment the tall grass appeared and then was gone and out of sight, as it blew in the direction we and the train were traveling. And the hedgehog appears, the one that got stuck in the fence and that we will have freed. And now that swing appears on a certain playground in the dusk, still swinging without the swinger, who has disappeared, and then it will have continued to be pushed by nothing but the wind.

  And with yet another step she saw in a flash the mouth of one of the rivers where it meets the other in the riverport city, with its sandbanks and the northern sky mirrored white in the water, one of the rivers black like the río Negro, the other blue and yellow like the Amazon, and the waterfowl from all the world’s rivers swarming there at the mouth. And with the following step she saw in a flash the shriveled onions sending out green shoots in the cellar of the bombed-out house. And with the following step there flew to her the neatly set table at the foot of the cliff. And with the following step, the fire seen through the little mica window in the door of the stove. And with the following, the sobbing from the telephone (which thus also became a setting).

  At last she reached a patch of woods where it was no longer merely dark but in fact pitch-dark. No, “pitch-dark” was not the word either, or “pitch-black,” for even with the juniper branch, which she held out in front of her like a blind person and tapped on the ground, she could not make any headway. Yet the moonless starry sky remained just as clear as before. The trees simply formed such a dense canopy between her and the sky that although a faint sparkle penetrated, it did not light her way even a thumb’s length ahead. What was that expression from the Sorbian-Arab village?—“a darkness you can hang an ax on.”

  One could not see one’s hand before one’s face? That was how it was. True, it would not have prevented her from pressing on. So why did she finally stop in her tracks? Because she no longer knew whether she would still have solid ground beneath her feet; because not another step was possible. To feel her way forward with her hands was still possible; but impossible to do that at the same time with her toes and soles. Another village expression came to mind: “no farther than a hen’s step.”

  For a while she tried shuffling along, without raising a foot. And could one make headway like this? Each step covered hardly half a span, and in the end perhaps just barely a toenail’s length. On this night there would be no finding her way out of this forest. And where she now stopped, total darkness reigned, without a glimmer, without any outlines, a darkness such as she had encountered only underground and in a tunnel. Since this was the case, and nothing to be done, she sat down to wait for morning.

  She did not have a flashlight on her, but she did have matches. Where she was crouching, she could feel brush under her fingertips and could have made a fire like the Jew’s harp player and lover of humanity much higher up in the Sierra. (Higher? She had been going downhill and uphill so constantly that the two of them were probably at the same elevation, but separated by ridges and yet more ridges?) But she preferred to remain in this unparalleled darkness, at the same time under an open, cloudless sky. She also did not want anyone down in the lowlands or elsewhere to see her fire and think she needed help.

  Did she need help? No. She stretched out, on her back. Even once her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, the earth and the world around her remained invisible; not a thing could be made out in the light of a star here or there, no leaf, no cluster of needles; what could be made out was only the darkness—but it could be made out after all—which took on shape, became a form, provided companionship. A bit earlier she had been walking along a brook at the bottom of a gorge that turned out to have no outlet, and thus for a while she had had to go uphill again, winding back and forth: from the water far below now barely a distant rushing. Otherwise, all around her not a sound to be heard.

  Not the slightest wind was blowing now, either. All night long, no breeze. Neither cold nor warm, no breath of coolness or mildness. In the total darkness the air stood still, could not even be felt as an element. Occasionally, astonishment that one had no trouble breathing. Involuntary sitting up and leaning back—was this a tree? Yes, it was, and to judge by the pattern of its bark, an oak. That meant one had already covered half the distance, from the heights above the tree line and through the belt of conifers. I have hardly ever seen this woman lean on anything, certainly not on a person. And now she sat on the bare ground and leaned back, and how.

  Then there were noises after all, sporadic ones, at intervals, and always the same: something hitting the forest floor, small yet very hard and heavy, after falling from a considerable height. And these were acorns, and they fell all night long, now farther away, now very close to her, now on the right, now on the left, now up on the mountain, now toward the valley. Was fall already around the corner, then? No, she had experienced just such a falling of acorns before, during a very different night spent out of doors, in a different part of the world. And during that Sierra night she heard it again inside her, and thus it deserved its moment in her story.

  The falling acorns, for all their distinct clinking, clanging, and eventually veritable “cymbaling,” produced mysterious sounds like those otherwise made by a single leaf or twig in a barely perceptible wind. At first they were joined by the last airplanes, at great altitudes, on the threshold of audibility, the planes on long-distance flights to overseas destinations, having taken off around midnight. Then came the night after midnight, and nothing but the tinkling of the acorns and
the acorn xylophone, more and more also an acorn vibraphone; yes, the darkness vibrated with the sound of falling acorns.

  For a time she dug into her provisions: “How groping for something to eat enhanced its taste—the greatly intensified quintessential bitterness of the rowanberries!” For a while also mere lying and resting. For a while sitting and taking notes, for me. What? writing in tunnel-like darkness, forming letters and words? Yes, and precisely under these circumstances with a particular presence of mind.

  And all the while, even though she now lacked the even rhythm of walking, there continued—except that by this time it was at an almost dizzying speed—the carousel of places and settings, darting, hot on each other’s heels, into the middle of whatever she was doing, and shooting through her; eventually also more like a cable or valley railroad.

  And in the meantime the series included places and things that did not belong to her in particular and did not originate in her own experience. Yes, that spot along the brook now, under the ash by the cow pasture, in the autumn rain that sounded so entirely different in the wilted, fallen, brittle foliage than in summer, that spot had also been hers at one time.

  But the hand that she saw next, a hand writing in the glow of an oil lamp, writing and writing and writing—in a rhythm she had never seen before—with a steel pen and black India ink, that was not her hand, or any hand from her own century, and the shoulders and profile of the writer that swept in along with the hand had transported her for a millisecond into the company of a man who, did he not belong to an era long past, would have been the author she dreamt of for her story? And I, the contemporary author in the village in La Mancha? What was I in comparison but a sort of stopgap?

  And how had he come to appear to her on that mountain-crossing night, her ideal writer for this commission, her Miguel de Cervantes? “As Miguel wrote and writes and will have written in a certain way, one felt in one’s own body, in one’s own shoulders, one’s own profile, one’s arms, one’s hips, one’s legs, how oneself and one’s story was, and could have been, and was being, traced by the moving writing instrument, and underlined, underlined and emphasized, emphasized and clad in beauty, clad in beauty and rendered truthful.”

  And yes, now, brushing past her like a falling star, the abandoned railroad spur, breaking off at a road through the fields, complete with rusty warning signs in the grass, that was part of her life again, her era, and she could have told me the name of the place, and where to locate it. But then: a woman as foreign to her as she was familiar, driven off course onto a new continent, in an odyssey never before told: How had the lightning flashing through her shown her this stranger?—Odysseus in the shape of a woman, and not alone on her odyssey, but with her child, and this odyssey, according to the information accompanying the flash, would have been the contemporary equivalent of Homer’s, the odyssey of a mother with her child! What a double-edged sword these flashes of places and constellations were: on the one hand confirming one’s existence, on the other hand—well, double-edged.

  38

  With the first light of morning, pale as distant daylight inside a cave, she set out, heading for the valley. She was almost in a hurry to get out of the Sierra de Gredos. Although outwardly she still had time, she no longer felt as though she did: Was it necessary for the fact of having time to be joined by the feeling, if one was to be able to benefit from having time?

  Did she lack for anything? Nothing, except that she was thirsty, and with a vengeance. For the first time on her journey she was almost driven. She rushed; walked as if being rushed. Yet she had long since left behind the overgrown stretch of forest and was passing through an unexpectedly day-bright section. This revealed itself as a transitional area, no longer in the midst of the Sierra yet still without signs of the foothills region, the plain as well as the peaks hidden from view by the belt of trees; also no sounds of civilization, neither honking nor cars passing each other, sounds that otherwise penetrated from the lowlands into the most remote reaches of the mountains. The area was devoid of trees, scruffy, with hardly any rocks, but the ferns were impressive, constituting the main vegetation here, their fronds overlapping, way over her head, a kind of fern forest.

  There was, however, one sign of human habitation: a road, or actually more of a footpath, leading diagonally down through the fern forest, with snapped fronds on either side. So she was no longer a pathless one, an asendereada. And what name did she give herself now? “La aventurera,” she said, “the adventurer.” Hadn’t she already been called that earlier in the story? That was her name again now, on the final stretch, with even more justification. She, such an orderly person, an adventurer? Yes, for she was at once orderly and bold, an orderly adventurer.

  Instead of in S-curves, the path now led straight down, but quite gradually, which suited her at the moment; the steep stretches of the Sierra lay behind her. And among the ferns she then also found something to quench her thirst: ground blackberries, whose runners crisscrossed the floor of the fern forest. Many of the berries were shriveled, or still green, or not yet formed, in bloom—all this again in a delightful confusion—and a few already ripe, altogether very few, “to be counted on the fingers of one hand.” Yet what a gift even one of these zarzamoras was. Gift? “Yes, at the sight of them I literally said: ‘a gift!’” she explained. What an ability this little ball of fruit, no bigger than a rabbit dropping, had to magically banish her parching thirst.

  The thirst had grown so fierce that one had, so to speak, to shut down one’s mouth, together with one’s tongue and throat, avoiding any movement, such as the tongue’s bumping against the palate, swallowing, taking a deep breath, for fear that with the slightest contact between parts of the mouth—if the tongue even brushed the gums—the need for water, water, water would turn one inside out. Now one tiny little blackberry was enough, and the burning in one’s gullet was a thing of the past.

  Unimaginable thirst? Yes, impossible to imagine that one had been thirsty just now. Besides: with the instantaneous relief, practically salvation, a sense of pleasure. The pure deliciousness, all-pervasive—and from such a tiny thing—made one open not only one’s mouth but also one’s eyes and ears.

  When she then ordered her author to come up with a hymn in praise of the Sierra blackberries, the man with the assignment replied that in his life as a writer he had already praised enough things, occasionally even one person or another—actually more “another,” and then he gave in, as usual: “If you insist—but only a short paragraph.”

  That she ran through the fern forest—she, who otherwise never ran; in her village no one ran—and finally even raced, was not, however, the doing of the couple of blackberries or the energy they gave her. The quick succession of world settings was still darting through her, passing faster than a heartbeat, and also no longer, as earlier, in a rhythm that coincided with the beating of the heart and reinforced it. (Anyone running or racing in her Sorbian-Arab village had to be a refugee or someone being pursued.)

  There was no longer any rhythm at all. A setting from her own experience, or increasingly from a universal human past in which she had not participated personally, would come suddenly, while the next would flash by so rapidly, overlapping it and getting tangled in it so that it made one dizzy. One could no longer speak of sequence and regularity; instead of a lovely jumble, an increasingly hopeless one.

  For the first time, no, not for the first time, in her life, the aventurera felt close to madness. Madness? “Going crazy—and I would have preferred hellish thirst to that.” It seemed appropriate that in one of the places or settings that came flying to her she saw herself as the former queen, shut up in the tower of Tordesillas in the sixteenth century, that queen whom history had dubbed Juana la Loca, Crazy Joan (she, too, had not gone mad, but, worse or maybe better, simply crazy). The crazy woman’s eyes were mirrored in the río Duero, the bright river, at which she stared down, unseeing—as if all that remained of her eyes were the whites. And the monk painted
by Zurbarán fleeing past her into the darkness, after his vision had shown him, where he had thought to find a light glowing, a whitish, desiccated, scabby tongue dotted with congealed blood, like the tongue of an animal run over on the road.

  That was the last of the settings, places, objects, fragments, in the overlapping, swirling series. The adventurer stumbled head over heels down the not very steep path, trying now to steer toward something like a port between the menacing shoals—like the people of Hondareda, she was now thinking in nautical terms. After the disappearance and obliteration of the río Duero, of the queen’s eyes, of the monk’s robe in the darkness, nothing more—no square, no place, no figure, no tongue.

  And then came the loss of images. (Not until this point was the author allowed to use this expression.) Loss of images? For the time being? No, once and for all. Personal loss of images? Her own? No, general. Universal. A general, universal loss of images. Who said that? How could one say such a thing? The story said it. Hers and mine, our story said it. It, the story, wanted it this way. This was how the story had visualized it.

  And it was in her, this adventurer as orderly as she was bold, that there, in the fern forest far below the summit plain of the Sierra de Gredos, the story wanted the general loss of images to be consummated.

  This was, to be sure, a problem of this period in history, and the loss of images, and of the image, took place in each person only gradually, not as suddenly as in her case now (which is perhaps partly an invention, yet not an untruth). But according to the story, the problem had to be described in conjunction with her, the solitary and isolated individual. According to the story, the adventurer was the last one who, while the loss of images had already taken hold of and infected people in general, was still in the picture, living among and from images. And maybe now I, the current author, am more the right one to tell the story of the loss of images than her Miguel (de Cervantes Saavedra, or whatever his name was), for whom this problem or topic would have been inconceivable? Or perhaps not?