Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  “Yet except for my first trip through the Sierra de Gredos, every other time I was alone here. And even on that first trip I soon struck out on my own, accompanied only by the child in my belly, without her father. It is only since the current day and evening that I have not been journeying through the Sierra alone! So the story can move along the way you like it!”

  And again she interrupted herself: “And it seems to me now, my listener and author, that the one commissioned to write the book is not you. It was not so much I who gave you the commission as you who gave it to me. I am the one you commissioned—at your service!” And as she momentarily took her hands off the wheel of the bus, she laughed; laughed out loud into the dark, silent bus. “How may I help you?”

  What was the seemingly familiar stranger laughing about up front at the wheel, in the pitch-darkness, which was even more intense outside than inside; which made one think from time to time that one was no longer being driven on a road but over bumps and humps, where outside and inside, except for the sound of the bus’s engine (more a grinding than the calming hum of the sparkling glass bus earlier) and the screeching, groaning, and rattling of the whole, whole? bus, everything had become as silent as the grave?

  The idiot at the wheel laughed, and did not stop laughing, and if she paused now and then, it was clear that she would immediately burst out laughing again, in the same hearty, childlike way, which after a while infected even the last and most resistant of the few remaining passengers and likewise the regular driver, apparently risen from the dead, if not entirely recovered and still lying there in back on his reclined seat, and made them laugh, too. The story goes that all the people in that night bus laughed out loud, at the same pitch as the woman at the wheel, although the bus then actually did make a detour over bumps and humps—when the road was partially buried by a rock slide—across a pasture, where cattle, looking in the dark like buffalo, scattered at a gallop; even the driver’s enormous dog showed his white teeth and seemed to laugh along, silently.

  In a film, the vehicle now meandering over this hummocky grazing area would have been visible first from the side, apparition-like, with the equally apparition-like silhouettes of its occupants, and in the next shot would have been seen from above, with the camera moving higher and higher, until the bus could no longer be identified as such, a small object crawling over the earth’s curved surface, and the occupants’ laughter would have filled the theater as the only sound accompanying the image. “With the laughing idiot as our driver, we felt idiotically safe,” even when she fell silent, and even when the coach rumbled through a mountain torrent that cascaded for a moment over the coach’s roof: the bridge there smashed, and, as later became apparent, not only this one, as if dynamited.

  Silently she resumed her conversation with herself, intended for the distant author: “Listen, just like my other landscapes scattered throughout the world, the Sierra de Gredos has come to represent for me, every time I am here, an example of something indestructible, in defiance of history and the present era, promising a life on earth that if not lasting an eternity will at least last half an eternity. Hear this, my listener and witness to my view of things: at some moments when I was on my way through the Sierra de Gredos—” (here she paused in her monologue) “—I have experienced this region as blessed, like many other parts of this planet, including cities, of course. But every single time, this Sierra de Gredos, offering a possible place where not only I but also we and those like us might live, has abruptly become a hostile, even deadly sphere, and each time I have counted myself incredibly lucky to have escaped with my life. Accursed Sierra!

  “So now you know the two reasons that spur me to set out whenever I can for this blessed/accursed Sierra de Gredos: on the one hand the world up here, which changes so abruptly, more powerfully and predictably than I have experienced in any other part of the world; and on the other hand, each time when I have escaped and am safe and sound again at home, the rendezvous every morning with images from here in the Sierra—peaceful ones, you understand—image and peace are ultimately one and the same—: images such as did not appear nearly so often and especially so comprehensively—the part for the whole—from those other regions where simply being there immediately filled one with hope.

  “And listen as I tell you and repeat what ‘image-forming’ means and signifies: the world is still standing. It has not perished, contrary to my brother’s belief. And listen as I tell you also that earlier on, before my crossings of the Sierra, I liked to travel with others, and often did so, and that soon I will be traveling with others again, here in the Sierra de Gredos and elsewhere.”

  Before the bus reached its destination, the route passed through several more watercourses. The bridges over them, too, destroyed. But the road swerved aside from the bridge and in the water became a ford, as it had probably been before any bridges were built, returning to asphalt on the other side. And during the traversing of these very shallow fords, in contrast to earlier in the mountain torrent, the water hardly rose and also did not wash over the sides of the bus; nothing but a splintering of ice floes along the banks.

  It also happened that the elderly vehicle, which creaked at the slightest unevenness, rammed into a block of granite in one of the fords. But that did not make any of the travelers uneasy. With her as the driver, nothing troubled them anymore. The very fact that a woman was driving cradled them in a sense of security, and the repeated traversing of the fords added to the temporary state of dreamlike carefreeness. None of them even looked up when the alder branches hanging far into the water whipped against the windows, sweeping from left to right; and even if a falling boulder had hit the roof or a grenade had exploded in front of the bus, they would not have been startled out of their peaceful reveries.

  The woman holding the reins up front on the coachman’s box also fell into a reflective daze, while remaining completely alert. Fording the brooks reminded her of the film in which she had played the youthful heroine. In that saga, set in the Middle Ages, she had also been constantly fording bodies of water, less brooks like these than rivers, often broad ones with deep spots, where the story required her, dressed in a kind of chain mail, to sink, fight for her life, and so on. Also a proper single combat, the final and decisive one—which, to be sure, was then broken off in the middle—between her and a, the, man, took place in just such a ford, complete with clashing swords, snorting steeds, and so on, the only variant being that, instead of slashing away silently at each other, they had to alternate shouting at one another, uttering tirades of insults that were by no means purely medieval and, in the course of the scene, gave way to an entirely different kind of speaking, and so on: cut, end of the film, man and woman up to their hips in the water of the ford, motionless, facing one another.

  And driving along cautiously and briskly, at the same time deep in reflection, she then brought to a close on this final stretch her silent monologue addressed to the absent author: “Whenever I cast my mind back to myself in all my misadventures and not seldom life-threatening solitary passages through the Sierra, I experience it not as something from the past but as the most intense present, assailing me and piercing me infinitely more keenly than during the moments, hours, or entire days and nights when I hovered between life and death. If in that blizzard I just missed letting myself fall down in the snow for good, the moment I revisit the situation I am threatened even more by that ultimate surrender: with the snow already up to my chest, I take one last step and after that will let myself tumble into the depths, never to return. And from an even earlier point in time, yes, point, from that first time in the Sierra, with the child in my womb, when I unexpectedly found myself completely disoriented, found? I am still there in the blazing sun on the southern flank, and the next time I recall that hour I will die, along with my unborn child, of heat stroke and abandonment.

  “But the images that come flying or flashing to me from the Sierra after the fact are also very much of the present. All such ima
ges—the only kind that matter to me for my, and our, story—not only those from the Sierra de Gredos, take place in the present. Yes, in contrast to my terrors and bad situations, the images become present to me playfully; the image itself as a game in which an entirely different present is in effect than my personal one. The images play out in an impersonal present, which is more, far more, than mine and yours; they take place in the grander time, and in a single tense, for which, when I consider them, the images, the term ‘present’ is not really appropriate—no, the images do not take place either in a grander or grand time, but in a time and in a tense for which no adjective, let alone a name, exists.

  “And listen, look: are not the images therefore, is not ‘the image’ a thoroughly epic problem, material for Homeric tales by the dozen? Material for a different odyssey, whose action takes place both externally and internally?”

  20

  To the accompaniment of these and other conversations with herself, she drove her fellow passengers, including the incapacitated driver and his dog, toward the late-evening bus’s destination, the village of Pedrada.

  Pedrada, which can be translated as “stone toss,” or “rain of stones,” or “hail of stones”—“siege of stones” would also be possible—is located in the innermost reaches of the Sierra region, or, as it says in that book set there many centuries ago, “in the bowels of the Sierra de Gredos.” And this Pedrada is one of the few villages at the headwaters of the río Tormes that lie right on the banks of the river and not, like Navarredonda (“Round Hollow”), Hoyos del Espino (“Thorn Hole”), Hoyos del Collado (“Hill Hole”), Navacepeda (“Vine Hollow”), and Navalperal (“Pear Hollow”), at a safe distance from the floodplain of the river, which here near its beginnings is not regulated anywhere. The houses of Pedrada are scattered through the river’s far-flung source area, slotted in between several streams and also mere rivulets, which singly and collectively, as they snake along from various sides, from the gentle slopes, flanks, and mostly treeless high plateaus, are referred to as the río Tormes.

  The sparse settlement lies among these almost innumerable, still narrow watercourses, which often meander through mountain-grass meadows, and it becomes a bit more prepossessing only at one spot, where the thousands of tributaries have gradually converged to form one river that quickly and unimpededly shoots over rapids and cascades, finally deserving of the name.

  The road that branches off toward Pedrada in Navarredonda de Gredos was a dead-end spur terminating in the village. From there no passable route continued; there were only livestock trails, and for a long time now there had been no paths for crossing the mountain chain to the south; those that had once existed were overgrown with broom, which by now had spread everywhere, forming a thicket as dense as a jungle, or, closer to the ridge, the path had been blocked by scree and boulders; the only exception the partially preserved path, or cordel, still used for driving the cattle caravans down to the flatlands in late fall or back into the mountains in spring.

  The author, not given to enthusiasm for such things, or simply lazy, had commissioned someone else to do research on that cordel, and on the transhumancia (= cattle-driving), “just as”—thus his excuse—“Flaubert did not snoop around himself at agricultural fairs or whatever for his Madame B. or whomever, but had an acquaintance describe such things for him in letters”: that trail, that cordel, or whatever, ran on the other side of Pedrada more or less from west to east, from El Barco de Ávila toward the deep trough of the Puerto del Pico, to spare the animals’ hooves the mountains with their razor-sharp wind gaps, and this route, with its bomb-crater-deep gullies and washouts, coming one after the other and taking up the entire stretch, had been impassable for decades to even the most heavy-duty vehicle or conveyance, whether with four-wheel or all-wheel drive. Even a hundred-wheel tank would have tipped over there sooner or later; not to mention a bus, and especially this one, driving through the night, even when driven by this stranger, this woman to whom the region around my Pedrada seems to be more familiar than to me, almost a native of the area, and under whose care—how nice and straight she sits at the wheel, her arms extended like oars, hardly moving the wheel—so does it turn itself on the curves?—I would like to stay on the road as far as the last stable of Pedrada and even up to the ridge of the Sierra, and then on and on forever.

  Almost all the passengers then got off the bus before its final destination. Each time they made their way to the front, stood beside the driver, and placed their hand on her shoulder shortly before the desired stop. Each was loaded down, as if returning from a long journey. Each turned in the open door once more to say thank you and goodbye to her, each using the same words but in an entirely different accent; and each, before he or she opened his or her mouth, cleared his or her throat and then said, “Thank you, good night, see you next time,” in the same raspy voice, as if he or she had not spoken for at least the entire day.

  All those who got off went on their way alone, immediately heading downhill from the dead-end road, never toward a house, at least not one that was visible, lit up; were promptly swallowed up by the darkness, in which at most an open fire burned, isolated and a long way off, from which now and then pitch-laden smoke wafted through the bus.

  When the bus reached the sign saying “Pedrada,” the only people left besides her were the driver, his dog, and the other woman who had helped her with the two of them. She noticed a new sign that announced PEDRADA in several other languages and scripts. And where was the familiar old hotel at the entrance to the village, at the spot where all the tributaries came together to form the río Tormes? What, the inn El Milano Real, “The Red Kite” (named after the bird of prey most common in the Sierra), no longer existed?

  In its place, between the streams, at the wellspring of the river, a tent, no, more like a colony of tents, a sort of tent village. And there were no streetlights any longer. Or had there ever been any? Yet in spite of the moonless night—hadn’t it been a full moon here not long ago? or was it too early for the moon to have risen?—all of Pedrada, or what was left of it, could be made out clearly.

  The light came from the sky above the source area, which was a sprawling, slightly concave, high plain, hollow and highland at the same time, the highest inhabited one in the Sierra? This sky seemed even bigger by night than by day, and twinkled or flashed with stars, in different colors, yellowish, bluish, red, white, green, and the light was collected on the ground and thrown back by the shiny deposits of quartz and mica, which seemed to be everywhere in this headwaters region, more so than anywhere else in the mountain range, reflecting the light of the firmament even from the clear bottom of the brooks and rivulets, though no higher than, let us say, the waistlines of the villagers, who were bustling about outside in astonishingly large numbers—their faces, and even more the space above the crowns of their heads, remaining in darkness.

  So many more and unfamiliar stars were visible that instead of the usual constellations one saw entirely unfamiliar ones and wanted to give them new, entirely unheard-of names. And although the snow-covered expanses on the summit plain that seemed hardly a stone’s or a boulder’s throw away contributed to making the night brighter, these stars hardly suggested wintry images. Did that perhaps have to do with the fact that Pedrada, like a few other places in the northern Sierra, had a sort of microclimate, lying beneath a dome of relatively and only intermittently warm air?

  Upon leaving the bus, one involuntarily splayed one’s fingers—that was how surprisingly mild the air was as it brushed one’s skin. Or did the warmth come from the open fires, even more numerous around the tents here in the heart of the village, especially the large fire, the size of several bonfires, glowing red-hot by the main tent, which looked taller than the vanished Milano Real? In Pedrada one could at first make sense of nothing. And one accepted that.

  There was also artificial light in the village, of course, but only inside the tents, and hardly any of it penetrated to the outside. This light,
produced by generators—every brook dotted with them—rendered the tents phosphorescent, as it were, or not only as it were, lent them a dimly glowing shape from within. Did that result from the hairline fissures and holes, invisible to the naked eye, in the tent walls? And likewise from the material of which the tents were made?

  For the tents did not consist of the material commonly used today, either canvas or some other fabric or plastic. Each of the tents, including the central one, was a cone constructed of wooden poles, lashed together with branches and vines, and layered from bottom to top, or was one mistaken? with leaves, grass, and broom twigs, held together with clay—didn’t “Gredos” mean “clay”?—in which the myriad fragments of mica contributed to the phosphorescent effect?

  So these were not light, easily transported tents but more like yurts, or what people imagine yurts to be? Earth-brown, clay-yellow hummocks, sprung up cheek by jowl from the earth like termite mounds (or what we imagine termite mounds to look like), into which the people here had needed only to hack a sort of narrow opening for a door, over which they then hung a pelt?

  As far as she was concerned, this former lady banker and sometime coach-box lady: Hadn’t she, in that moment of getting off the bus in Pedrada, “my driving duties fulfilled,” seen the tents or yurts as those tree roots, ripped from the ground and tipped over to lie horizontally, in the hurricane-ravaged forests back home near the northwestern riverport city that she had visited the morning she set out? And hadn’t various things from home also followed her during the entire time of her journey? or traveled with her? or seemed to have got there ahead of her whenever she arrived?