by Peter Handke
His guest, the client, gazed awhile along the line of her shoulder, focusing on some distant vanishing point, and then raised? or rather lowered, her voice: “Yes, no image, no images of various national libraries where we spent a short or a long time, and if the image of one that burned, then not the library in Alexandria but one from a house fire long ago in the village, the remains of books all mixed up with shattered windowpanes, and apples roasted by the heat lying in the grass under a tree, far from the actual site of the fire.
“And another image: that of a lending library on the outskirts of a metropolis situated by the ocean, installed in a former customs agent’s hut, between the path once used by the customs officials and the steep cliff nearby, the path widened into a promenade, and the hut a single room, rendered much brighter by the windows, which had been enlarged on all sides, and a view, past the people strolling along the customs path, far, far out over the surface of the water, and not a single reader in the image, nothing but the silhouettes of the books between the ocean in the background and the pedestrians, bicyclists, and roller skaters in the foreground, and that, day in, day out, year in, year out, always the same image before my eyes, or perhaps sometimes also an image of this library late at night; the silhouettes of the books and the salty deep way out there viewed together through the display-window-size panes in the near darkness, with not a soul in sight.”—“And in the reality-outside-this-image, this branch library has certainly long since been turned into a branch bank?” (the author)—She: “More likely converted into a customs-path museum.” —Both at the same time, inadvertently: “As it should be.”—The woman, the guest: “Which puts us back in the bus traveling into the Sierra de Gredos.”
Almost as often as she had crossed the Sierra she had also passed through the Polvereda, the dust-cloud region, and the village of the same name. And each time she had encountered almost the same people, evidently mountain-dwellers from way back, similarly dressed, all with a similar accent, similar mannerisms, and especially a similar skin tone.
But on the day described here, much appeared entirely different to her. True, the natives were walking and especially sitting—the older card and dice players indoors in the one bar, those who were too old to play outside in the sun, low in the sky—as if they had always been there. Except that now they no longer dominated the scene. They shopped and borrowed books from the bus in about the same proportion as those wearing big-city clothes, who likewise came from Polvereda, or at least were not strangers here. Yet between these two groups, involved in the same activities, was a third group, apparently a distinct minority, and this one constituted the new and noticeable element in the mountain village. Groups? No, none of the three different sets of people formed anything like a group, not the returnees or vacationers from the capital, not even the natives, and certainly not the last category; they all came and went independently of each other.
The third or last type seemed particularly separate from one another. Was that because each of them had a different skin color, if only in small but obvious variations, from deep black to bronze to reddish brown, from olive to peach to lemony to rich yellow, from quince yellow to yellowish gray to blue-green to snow-white, this last unusual precisely in this mountainous region? Earlier it would have been said that these individuals, one after the other, exemplified a “race” or its “variants” and “subvariants.” And now? At the time of this story the word “race” had long since disappeared, and was used, if at all, merely to designate external, superficial traits, such as skin tone, but preferably it was avoided altogether.
Or did these people with differently pigmented or overly white skin stand out so markedly because some of them turned up in garments and with headgear entirely unknown in the Sierra, and furthermore known nowadays only from archival pictures: so to speak, in tribal or native costumes (words like “tribe” or “native” also long since out of use, if not suspect and frowned upon), in “caftans” (?), “saris” (?), “burnooses” (?), with a “fez” (?), a “turban” (?), a “kaffiya,” or God only knows what they were all called?
Yet individuals of the third type were apparently not so unknown in the village after all; or no longer, and for a considerable time already. They moved across the Plaza Mayor as matter-of-factly as the others; spoke the language of the country halfway fluently, although each with an immediately recognizable, not seldom transnational, accent; except for that one ancient Chinese (the term “ancient” otherwise to be strictly avoided), wearing a visored cap and an all-blue tunic buttoned up to the neck, padding in silent cloth shoes with a sort of delicate shyness, such as had not been observed anywhere else in the country and thus striking to the eye—the eye was what mattered—and describing a monumental arc of courtesy, of “deference,” around everyone, even the dogs, and then, in the bus, pointing mutely but firmly to the one book for whose sake he had made his way to the library. It was the book in his language, with Chinese characters, stepladder-like.
And like the ancient Chinaman, others from the races, peoples, and tribes foreign to this region would borrow, along with a, let us say, domestic Spanish, Romance, Latin, or European book, one from their land of origin: obviously the one they asked for, whether requested ahead of time or not, was available in the traveling library. Initially amazed at this scene, she soon experienced no further amazement as she perched on the drinking trough and watched; or her amazement became so powerful and exclusive that it was no longer recognizable as such?
18
And again the signal for driving on. Departure from Polvereda, away from the dust clouds. But this time no ringing of a hand bell: ordinary honking, though considerably more insistent, more shrill to the ears. Nor did it come from the glass and library bus, but from another vehicle, which at that moment came backing out of a shed previously assumed to be an abandoned storage building.
The second bus was an ordinary one, not exactly new, but more suitable than the first for the mountain switchbacks. The travelers changed buses, except for the children, who will ride back with their library, driven by the bus driver, who in the meantime has fallen silent, next to him his silent son—their dialogue having in the meantime become unnecessary? Already they have driven off. But the new driver likewise has a companion sitting next to him, an enormous, very quiet sheepdog, his face, in profile, pointed constantly toward his master.
In this connecting bus it had been cold, not only as they set out but also long after that, and it had reeked of cigarette smoke and various other things. And trepidation had crept through the thinned ranks of the passengers; as if, with the children gone, they no longer saw themselves protected.
No one said a word. No one turned his head, not to any other passenger and certainly not to the mountain landscape, now growing increasingly precipitous, where, after the first switchback—part of a system of serpentine curves laid out evenly over the entire width of the last rise and barrier before the Sierra—the summit plain, visible just a little while earlier from the village square, was now blocked out again.
No one responded, not even the new driver, when a farmhand waved from a wheat field no larger than a garden, located just over the tree line and separated from its rocky surroundings by a stone wall of granite, the wheat shocks scattered among the stubble; no one took the time to interpret the old man’s gesture as a wish for good luck or even a blessing for the journey; nor did anyone take the time to be surprised at seeing wheat fields at such an altitude, almost two thousand meters above sea level, if only one such field.
She alone, the adventurer, seated directly behind the driver and the dog, seemed to have time again, as since the beginning of this journey,—“her last, it was to be hoped”—time and more time. “And having time,” she indicated to the author, “meant to me: being free of anxiety, of worry, of constraint; no fear of winter, of slippery roads, of getting stuck on this otherwise long impassable stretch of road, of a below-freezing night in the mountains, of pitch-darkness, of anything of any s
ort.
“Nonetheless I naturally—naturally?—had an awareness of the dangers, perhaps more acutely than my fellow passengers; and of one danger in particular, the great danger. But on that stretch of road my feeling of having time was more powerful than my awareness of danger. It was like that game where the paper covers the stone and therefore the ‘paper’ player beats the ‘stone’ player: in this instance, feeling trumped awareness, while in a different situation, at a different time, awareness could certainly have been the scissors to my feeling of having time—my feeling would have been cut to shreds by my awareness …”
Awareness of being in danger and the feeling of having time: if this was in fact a game, it was one without a winner and a loser. Instead one complemented the other, and, furthermore, both together gave birth to a third factor. In this confined, tinny, drafty vehicle she felt the kind of jolt go through the story for whose sake she had set out on this journey; a tightening, a powerful tugging and pulling, a pull. She sensed, no, she saw and felt, that her book, after all the intervening explications and descriptions, which of course were just as much part of it (a little like the lasso-like, looping serpentines along which the bus was rolling uphill), was now back to simply being told, or, even better and lovelier, was telling itself; was approaching that most sublime of narrative sensations, when “it narrates itself,” “I, you, it, all of you, she, we, we are freely narrated, out of one country into another, at least for a while, and again and again in this fashion, and now and then, as the entirely appropriate rarity and precious thing in the book of our life.”
She was the one passenger in the bus who looked out the window; who waved back at the farmhand in the enclosure, with a mere shimmer in the corners of her eyes; who turned around to the others, all of whom gradually got up from their scattered seats and moved toward the front, huddling together, more around her than around the driver, forming a cluster in the front of the bus similar to that of the children in the back of the bus on the earlier stage of the trip.
Only a few passengers were left, and as she gazed at them one at a time, it seemed to her that not only the bus had been changed in Polvereda but also, except for her, all the passengers, and at the same time that each of those few faces was familiar. They had already had something to do with each other, and in a life-altering way at that; their life lines had crossed at some point, but in what manner? under what circumstances?
And again the bus was approaching a pass, in the first twilight, which could just as well be the first light of dawn. After that the Gredos massif would finally stand there without any foothills, with the upland valley to the north carved by the río Tormes, whose headwaters lay in the Sierra. And again this crossing point was marked by clouds welling up thickly against the deep blue, almost black, air over the notch in the rocky ridge, and alternating with swaths of mist and light snow and moments of clear weather.
From this weather-basin haze emerged now and then the silhouette of one of the flying men letting the rising air currents carry them aloft on their artificial, brilliantly colored wings. Initially some of the flyers were swept so high that they were bathed in the last sunlight, while for the earth below, including the crests of the foothills, the sun had already set. And in very slow, snaking curves, almost as gradual as the winged creatures tracing their spirals in the air, the bus drew closer to, then farther away from, then closer to the pass and the kite-flyers, or whatever they claimed to be. Alongside stretched a short, naturally formed plateau, used by the sportsmen for their running starts and takeoffs. It was swept by uninterrupted courses of clouds rushing by, and lay there in a haze.
And when the bus had almost reached the pass—the sign reading “Puerto de Peña Negra [= Black Rock Pass], 1900m” all the more legible for moments at the threshold to the cloud kitchen—one of the birdmen landed, instead of taking off like his companions, there on the flat spot, and having hardly touched—almost crashed—down, ran, no, dashed out of the picture, as if sucked into and dissolved by the mist, including his wings, crossed or tangled on his back.
Wherever was the place, necessarily much higher up, from which he had pushed off earlier? And hadn’t his flying apparatus actually been a parachute, which had briefly billowed behind and above him again as he ran? And no brightly colored sports parachute, either, but rather one in rock gray or Swiss-pine brown, in camouflage colors, so to speak, and not only so to speak? A military parachute?
Or had all the peculiar cloud formations in all the Sierra passes, or could it have been something else? cast such an evil spell on the passengers in the bus that they saw war in peacetime? saw instead of a boulder one made of papier-mâché and painted stone-color, “in reality” a covering for a tank concealed underneath? saw behind the façade of an apparent woodpile the storage place for a stack of machine guns? just as the hero of the book set in that region had once seen a marauding knight in every shepherd?
Or was this in the meantime a period unlike that one long ago, and did the vanes of the windmills sawing the air now in fact represent something other than mere “windmill vanes,” not exactly “evil giants,” but certainly something else? and the same was true of the ball-like object that came rolling unexpectedly around the foot of a cliff? of these scarecrows mounted clear across the valley? of these naked mannequins stacked in the back of a passing truck?
And who could know whether “in reality” the ugly-as-sin or perhaps imaginary chosen lady of the hero in that immortal book may have been, and perhaps is, just as beautiful and noble, yes, infinitely more noble and beautiful and especially more real than her suitor portrayed, and portrays, her? and that she was waiting, and is waiting, for him in precisely that village in La Mancha where he imagined her, and, the epitome of beauty and youth and reality, will continue to wait for him?
Be that as it might: what was certain was that these travelers here had not set out in the spirit of adventure, in contrast to that literary hero. They even visibly feared adventure. If it had been up to them, they would perhaps not have set out in the first place. Even when they were children, tunnels of horrors had held little attraction for them. It was not only the old folks whose heads bobbed back and forth like those of helpless infants as they were driven along. The only adventurer among them was the woman sitting up front in the bus, at once a total stranger and familiar.
She looked as if she were lying in wait or poised to throw: to throw herself into an adventure, to hurl herself completely off balance—wasn’t the word “lance” part of that concept? What a glow in her eyes as she had turned to watch the paratrooper, or whoever he was, dart among the sport-flyers. And when the bus had driven through the Puerto de Peña Negra, or whatever the pass was called, and scraped against the side of a cliff, and, after veering this way and that, seemingly no longer under the driver’s control, come to a halt diagonally across the road, with its engine stalled, she was instantly up front at the wheel, where she grasped the driver, who had slumped over it, under the armpits and carefully bedded him down at the feet of his enormous dog, who was whimpering almost like a small child.
“Not something like a stray bullet?” the author asked: “The very expression ‘stray bullet’ is something I could never bring myself to write, at least not in your, and our, book!”—“You could have been one of the passengers in the bus with me,” she replied. “But not to worry: if there is to be any adventure, it will have the most limited or strictly abbreviated episodes of overt violence or fighting possible. How else would you have been the one I went out of my way to hire to write the story? If there is to be action, there will generally be less emphasis on purely external action than on the kind that from time to time erupts from the inside to the outside in the rhythm of a long, long story.
“Accordingly, you may go ahead and write that at the last summit of the last pass before the Sierra the driver was not struck by a bullet, either a stray one or any other kind. He just felt sick all of a sudden. He had probably had a heart attack, or it was an asthma attac
k that ripped the steering wheel from his hands. Another woman in the bus helped me drag him outside, where he promptly regained consciousness.” And she helped him up. He did not want to sit; stood leaning against the cliff by the road. The color drained from his rooster- or birthmark-red face. She scooped up icy water gushing from the cliff and sprinkled it on his wrists. The dog trotted back and forth in front of its master in a figure eight, whimpering, and then lay down quietly on its belly beside him, its head raised.
After that, no one will have moved. The two women also motionless, one of them right beside the driver, her hand on his shoulder. Not one word was spoken, either, the other woman having turned off the bus radio the minute she came forward to help. Nothing but the rattling of tall thistles in the wind from the Sierra. The tableau held. The sick man repeatedly tried to straighten up and get back on the bus, and again and again his knees buckled. The two women—it was clear that no one else was allowed to help them—picked him up by his arms and legs and carried him inside, bedding him down on one of the unoccupied rows of seats toward the back. The dog followed and lay down parallel to him, its back so high that it would keep him from rolling off.
By now the adventurer had taken her place in the driver’s seat and turned the key; the bus drove on, heading downhill, just as steadily as before. Although for some time now she had hardly been playing her professional role as the lady banker, the skills peculiar to this profession continued to manifest themselves in the situations typical of this altered world, allowing her to take charge, make decisions, and determine the sequence of events: the combination of service and authority so characteristic of her work; patient, almost somnambulistic waiting for results and seizing the one favorable moment in a seemingly brutal yet at the same time gingerly fashion; forestalling, saving the day, promoting one’s own interests.
