Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  12

  At some temporal distance from the events outlined here, a historian later provided an exhaustive account of the Nuevo Bazar of that period. Let his ramblings—for that is what they are—be introduced here by a few excerpts, on the suggestion of our protagonist, who sees it as an essential feature of the book devoted to her, first of all, that she disappear occasionally from its pages (though with her presence still felt, for instance as its reader) and, second, that in this book, albeit not too often, a problem of rhythm!, some passages occur that are not exactly filthy, but certainly grubby, bordering on the tasteless and abstruse, to be sure only bordering, and playing fast and loose with reality—instead of, as is otherwise a basic principle of her story, seeking and exploring reality in a sort of quest.

  Let this point also be made to preface the historian’s passages: he appointed himself the representative of the profession and furthermore a “specialist, respected throughout Europe, on the Nuevo Bazar Zone”; his statements, despite their carefully cultivated tone of historical objectivity, are dictated by overzealousness and ill will (the author of that tendentious travel guide could have been one of his predecessors); and finally, it would be plain to a blind man that he had spent his entire life or half-life as a private historian in a zone very similar to Nuevo Bazar, perhaps even identical with it.

  It begins with the historian’s wanting to see each of the many peoples in the Zone as manifesting only the worst, most evil, or ugly of its “historically conditioned peculiarities and characteristics.” The good, better, attractive, likable traits of any people in the Zone were long ago eradicated, precisely by the elimination of borders and barriers between the individual peoples: the elimination of historical ones “rightfully and indubitably” to be viewed as progress and liberation, but with them went the “natural” ones as well, which, along with threshold anxiety, also drove out of the people on either side any of the “threshold awareness” that had functioned as a “basis for national education,” as an “instrument of national refinement”: leaving no ability to distinguish between here and there.

  “One people, in the territory of any other people, behaved more and more as though it were in its own territory, in the sense of behaving all the more badly—uniquely and exclusively badly—for over there, beyond the former borders, it is of course not our people, but since the elimination of the borders it is our territory. Our territory? our free range, our space for wallowing and mucking around, our surrogate battleground. If the individual peoples in the Zone would simply regard the entire area as their own, at least now and then one of their good qualities would manifest itself.

  “Thus as far as the Zone is concerned, the comforting concept formulated by one of my historiographical predecessors, that of cultural continuity, meaning the indestructible qualities of the peoples, which includes those legendary ties to a place and to a historical mission that persist even in the face of near extinction, exile, destruction of traditions, of economic systems, of compilations of legal precedents—this comforting concept, when applied to the Zone [one of those typical private-historian utterances, so complicated that the beginning has to be reiterated at the end!] is actually tinged with mockery.

  “The only cultural continuity maintained among one of the peoples there is the coarseness and obscenity for which it has been known since the Thirty Years’ War (not a trace left of its love of celebrations or its hospitality); among another people nothing remains but the habit, for which it has been known since the early Middle Ages, of yelling and elbowing others out of the way—its newspapers are even so large that when they flip them open anyone sitting nearby has to move—and at the same time a penchant for pussyfooting around (without their once famous ability to turn inward and suddenly step elegantly out of the way); and the cultural continuity of the third or other Zone people, praised in antiquity and earlier still, even by foreign chroniclers, for their love of children, knowledge of the stars, expertise in fruit growing, and skill as mariners, now expresses itself exclusively in two characteristics mentioned previously only in passing by hostile historians: gluttony and a passion for foul language and negative attitudes (not a single statement without a tacked-on opinion, always a bad one, or a profanity, never intended humorously—an honest-to-goodness curse). Thus only negative characteristics as cultural continuity among the peoples of the Zone? Only those characteristics that lash out.”

  And that is by no means all. This would-be historian has even worse things to say. He works himself up to describing the people of Nuevo Bazar in terms that bear not the slightest relation to any visible reality, less descriptions than figments of his imagination.

  Thus he mentions, as a custom shared by all the different ethnic groups in his day, that they do not clip their mobile phones onto their belts or elsewhere but drag them along, in the settled areas, on a line or a leash, almost as long as for a dog, “on a rail specially installed for this purpose by the Zone administration.” Furthermore, according to him, all the inhabitants, without exception, including any children who know how to count, are required to have such a device with them at all times, and to keep it switched on.

  “On the other hand there was a regulation stipulating that if one received a call one had to put on a special helmet, which concealed the speaker’s or listener’s face, along with its expressions, from the eyes of others on the street, and muffled his voice, at the same time distorting it to the point of incomprehensibility. Time and again it happened in the Zone in those days that a person telecommunicating out on the street without the prescribed facial shield would have his hand knocked from his ear by one of the specially appointed enforcers, with a stick designed just for that purpose (and not a few civilians played policeman, using their bare fists), and time and again mistakes were made, when a presumed violator was merely holding his hand to his ear as he walked—mistakes that did not always simply end with an apology and the apology’s being accepted.

  “Altogether, the entire Zone was notable for being a source of mistakes and mix-ups. The residents of the Zone did not even become aware of most of them, or if they did, fortunately there were no serious consequences. To mention (for the last time!) those long-distance-calling minis that everyone had to carry: especially in the spring, which still occurred in the Zone, though very inconspicuously, quite often one of those out on the street would mistake the sudden squawking of birds, whether close by or high up in the air, for his telephone’s ringing, and would promptly press the little button, after obediently popping on the helmet. And one never saw anyone in Nuevo Bazar doing actual work; certainly there were people slaving away, but they were kept out of sight or were so far off that they no longer had any significance. And all the wares from the wide world seemed to be available, but when one really needed something, it was nowhere, but nowhere, to be found. And while all the alleged monuments glowed and glittered, the hordes of pedestrians below waited in vain for the simple headlights of buses and other means of transportation.

  “And since each of the approximately nine hundred ninety-nine ethnic groups in the Zone had its own ring tone, when a titmouse squeaked, only the Galicians would answer; when a blackbird chirped, the Valencians; when a falcon screeched, the Andalusians; when a lark trilled, the Carinthians; when a woodpecker rapped, the New Spartans; when a jackdaw squawked, the Chumadians. But no one in the throng would react to the clattering, or rather rattling, of the storks, which periodically drowned out all the other sounds or noises. Here, as everywhere on the mesa—in spite of everything, the Zone continued to be a part of it—the storks built their basket-like nests atop the church towers, but their sound not only did not match any of the different rings; it was not even heard by the people of the Zone, or if it was heard, it was mistaken for a stick caught in a vehicle’s wheel. No one knew that there was life up there among the presumably dried-out twigs atop the tower; not even the children looked up to see the dagger-like beaks poking out of the nests, or the fighter planes overhead.
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  “Among the innumerable mix-ups occurring daily in the Zone at that time, others were less innocuous: the mere sound of the wind had become so unfamiliar that a person hearing a rushing behind him would take it for a truck bearing down on him, and would involuntarily jump out of the way, and precisely thereby … Another person might hear the crunching of footsteps growing louder and louder on all sides, and, assuming that he was surrounded by enemies, would fire blindly in all directions—many adults in the Zone were armed, and not only adults—yet the crunching was actually the croaking of frogs, which continued to have their moist places, though hidden from view.”

  And the height of the Zone’s self-appointed historian’s ridiculous imaginings, an example of his utter disregard for the principle articulated long before him by a narrator of an entirely different sort—“to present this and that to the reader without drawing any conclusions!”—could be found in his conclusions, which he prefaced with a few final aspersions, cast not only on the people of the Zone but also on the animals, plants, and objects there.

  “To be sure, there were still a few original inhabitants in the Zone who referred to themselves as being ‘of the old school.’ But they were dying out. All the others had moved there from elsewhere, most of them already two or three generations back, without displaying any trace of the regions and countries from which their ancestors came, indeed without any knowledge of those ancestors. Each person stalked around as his own hero; there was bragging even in the eyes of the infants: ‘Whatever you people are, I’ve been for a long time already. In a pinch, I’d be a better singer than Orpheus or Bob Dylan. If I wrote a book, Cervantes and Tolstoy would be rank amateurs by comparison. If I had to direct movies, they would make Birth of a Nation and Viridiana look like home videos. If I were asked to paint a picture … ,’ and so on. Admiration and enthusiasm for the actions and accomplishments of anyone else was considered old-fashioned and embarrassing, or was merely feigned, and in such a way as to be intentionally transparent. Yet in the Zone and on the street, as well as on the Zone TV and the Zone Internet (which was limited to the Zone!), one of the most frequently used words was ‘love.’ ‘I love this salt shaker, I love this purple, we (couples always spoke in the first person plural) love New Zealand wines, we loved the latest work by …’ (even the booksellers used nothing but the first person plural, whether they were several or only one) …

  “In truth, what had once been love had long since disappeared from the Zone. And that revealed itself above all in the fact that each person had his own way of measuring time; in fact, all the digital watches beeped to mark the hours at completely different intervals. And each person followed his own clock, lording it over everyone else with his personal time. Not only the credit cards but also the paper currency displayed their owner’s picture almost immediately after coming into his possession. While on one street veritable hordes of judges paraded in full regalia, on a nearby parallel street the daily procession of felons took place. Even the worst criminals (often former statesmen and their ilk) moved about freely in the Zone, openly and as a matter of course, aware that they would never ever be punished.

  “As far as I am concerned, perhaps here and there a hint of that extinct love may have revived. But the person in whom it revived remained hopelessly alone with it. Only the haters still formed a community. Even the children in the Zone were handicapped by bad qualities, at first imposed on and instilled in them, soon innate. If one of the last two or three original inhabitants happened to speak to such a child from the heart, saying, ‘Be yourself!’ (this might be an old photographer, setting up a school photo), the child would promptly, at a complete loss, make a whole succession of faces, not one of which was anywhere near ‘the right one.’

  “Another thing was that any child in the Zone, if asked about the points of the compass, would be incapable of pointing out south, north, west, and east (and most of the adults could not do so either). Bees were called wasps, or vice versa. Chestnuts, although people enjoyed eating them roasted, on a plate, were not recognized when they were lying under their tree (in spite of everything, there was still the occasional chestnut tree on the edge of the Zone). An apple, if it was not arranged in a basket in front of a store, but was hanging from a tree, among the leaves (in spite of everything, there were still …), was not recognized as a fruit, and was left there to rot.

  “Of course one also from time to time saw the Zone, which, by the way, was not in a world of its own, dotted with the colorful neckerchiefs of all sorts of scout troops. But instead of exploring nature, these troops behaved more like militias, with casually worn daggers (whose forms could be ascribed to the many ethnic groups that had moved into the area), under the motto ‘Do one bad deed every day,’ even if that consisted merely of pushing someone from another ethnic group off the sidewalk. In the Zone, even gardeners, who are favorably looked upon everywhere else, were likewise no longer considered ‘good folk’: even they, the good gardeners of yore, went all out to make life miserable for their neighbors, perhaps by deploying all their equipment, enough for ten fire departments, against every individual blade of grass, and with blaring sirens to match, and preferably on Sundays; or else these battalions of gardeners, the most avid patrons of taverns after work, would move in like an eviction squad and beat up a person standing alone at the bar, preferably a former hunter from the steppes, a remnant of the original population, quietly sipping his drink by himself.

  “It is uncertain whether the many mutations among the plants in the Zone can be traced back to the gardeners’ constant spraying with toxic chemicals, etc.: what was clear, at any rate, was that the stinging nettles that still sprang up vigorously here and there, in spite of everything, no longer stung—yet some of them stung all the more savagely: one of the increasingly cruel perfidiousnesses of the Zone’s gardeners, who had mutated along with the plants—just as during that period the Zone’s sparrows more and more mutated into vultures, and the small black ants into termites (overnight all that was left of the Zone’s parliament was its façade. But even before the building was gobbled up it had become a mere stage set).”

  The conclusion drawn by our would-be archivist followed: “In light of all this, one could ask oneself whether these very conditions in the Zone might not give rise to a longing for another world, for entirely different possibilities, or any possibility at all. Except that there was no other world or possibility anywhere.” (So the person drawing this conclusion did not consider such a longing worthy of even a question mark?) “On the contrary, one of the influential books of the time, entitled The New Candide, argued that the conditions prevailing in the Zone were the best of all possible worlds!” Yet didn’t precisely the crowding, the large number of inhabitants of Nuevo Bazar, argue for the opposite? How can one imagine forming such a large number? Imagine? Image? For shame!

  13

  Back to my woman from the northwestern riverport city. In contrast to her hired author in his village in La Mancha, she had no objection to the tendencies manifested by that would-be historian from whom we have heard in the interim. For during that night in Nuevo Bazar, a night as bright as day, she found his seemingly groundless assertions confirmed in some fundamental respects.

  It was true that almost everyone on the streets strode along as his own king, and also expected anyone he encountered to make the appropriate obeisance. And because each individual used his personal sense of time to tyrannize over the person in whose company he happened to be, repeatedly the apparently peaceful bustle would experience from one moment to the next an audible and visible jolt: shouting, screaming, hitting, violence (which would then subside just as suddenly); among the faces that looked so similar, and so balanced, wherever one went there would be one, two, or several that in the twinkling of an eye could turn into grotesque masks, with teeth bared, tongues lolling or stuck out, and the well-tempered, almost overly civilized voices—which everywhere, even among the older children, could easily be mistaken in intonation and
pacing for the sonorous tones of radio and television announcers—after an abrupt catching of the breath were transformed into the screeching, growling, and hissing of apes? hyenas? beasts of prey?, no, of human beings turning savage, with a savagery utterly different from the putative primeval variety.

  And immediately afterward—the grimaces and howling suppressed and silenced with such uncanny rapidity that the bared teeth and screeching seemed to have been a chimera—the earlier monolithic equanimity and radio-announcer sonorousness restored; except that now one increasingly suspected general pretense, masquerade, and playacting; as if it were already Carnival time here in Nuevo Bazar; except that each person, following his self-declared time-reckoning, was making his way to his very own celebration; intent upon appearing as the particular historical figure and assuming the particular role that had been reserved for him since birth.

  Then she, too, felt almost infected by the constant oscillation between sonorous magic, shrill unmasking, remasking, and growing suspicion. She also noticed that the longer she stayed in Nuevo Bazar, the more she herself regarded people, and hence also the smallest phenomena, with suspicion, even at a distance and with gun cocked, as it were, no, not merely as it were. And she realized that suspicion and the proliferating mix-ups in the Zone went hand in hand—although in her case without the terrible consequences so common there.