Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  “And I reject this game. It is a misuse of the hands on the wheel, of the trusty driver’s role. It should be prohibited. But who would prohibit it—when it is entire countries and the powerful who are most deeply involved? It has become a game that not only does not get things moving or move things in the right direction, but actually destroys them. I myself do not enjoy playing games, have never really learned to play. Yet the form of play that has been required of me recently is even more evil, cold, and lethal than chess: it is true that its main moves continue to consist of exercising forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, and forestalling, but all this has acquired a profoundly different significance. Banking and the stock exchange have come to consist almost exclusively of a cold, ruthless gambling for profit that has nothing to do with my idea of how I should be working.

  “Being forced to play the game leaves me hardly any room for free play. And those who have recently entered our profession, because, as natural gamblers, or whatever they are, they have come to expect of it, and rightly so, a life like a game, now live in constant fear, even when they assert the opposite to their paying public. For this game cannot be mastered by even the most skillful players. In their dreams, and perhaps all too soon in reality, they are devoured by it from head to toe. They do not want to play anymore. But once started …

  “Anyone who starts this game has to play it through to the end, and that is its most damaging feature. Luckily for me, in this case at least, I do not know how to play, and thus never began …”

  The former magazine writer: “In our interview you did not so much as hint at any of this. Nor did you want to answer any questions about your brother in prison, your vanished child, the child’s unknown father, and/or your lover at the time / at present. The only things you agreed to discuss were sturdy shoes, fruit trees—you favored me with a complete lecture on the particular white of quince blossoms—, chefs, seasonings (O saffron, O coriander), mountain-climbing techniques, the most remote island in the Atlantic, children’s toys in the Middle Ages, weight distribution while one is ascending and descending mountains, the fragrance of linden blossoms in June—‘the fragrance that seems to come from farthest away’—My Darling Clementine, and Westerns in general, hedgehogs, the beauties of night hiking, the best pencils, and so on, for days and nights on end.

  “And now this brutal frankness—which would not have been suitable for the magazine anyway, or would it? And what will you do without your profession, without your wheeling and dealing? Establish a different kind of bank? An anti-gambling bank? Make a second film? Write a story about different types of pencils?”

  She: “What I plan to do? Practice even more forethought. Do even more foreseeing and forecasting. Forestall even more usefully and necessarily. Make even more sure that along with me, now that I myself have time, plenty of time, this person or that also has time, plenty of time, time and more time. And perhaps learn to play at last. Not the profit game but a finder’s game. Or simply become playful. And find my daughter again, here in the Sierra de Gredos. And find, here or elsewhere, my unknown lover. For he is alive, and he exists, just so you know, just so all of you know. And speak with my brother, not as I did during the last few years from the visitors’ perch in the prison behind the dunes, where a dozen of us had to shout, and could not hear our own voices, let alone those of the people we were visiting. And perhaps also find the various small items I have lost here in the Sierra over the years, a scarf one time, a hair comb another time, a cap, a shawl—especially the shawl. Each time I was sure when I set out that along the road one of the objects from the previous year or the year before would gleam up at me, unharmed, in spite of storms, rain, and snow, and each time I ended up losing something else. But this time, just wait!

  “And how in each of you here I see one of my near and dear. In you, dear interviewer, I see my daughter, whom I actually so often failed to recognize as my own child, even when she came through the door and stood before me. Ah, even on the day she was born, when she was brought to my room, I said to myself in that first moment: So who is this splendid newborn with this self-confident, seemingly cocky face, at the same time so vulnerable, looking ready to play? And later, when I was visiting a strange house with her, an unknown child unexpectedly came in the door from the garden or somewhere else, making not a sound, very pale—the pallor that you now display as well—and I thought to myself: Who in the world is this solemn, quiet child; never have I seen anyone so solemn, pale, and quiet in all my life—until it struck me that this was my own child, from whom I had been separated for less than a day. And even later, after her first disappearance—now that you are not interrogating me, I can reveal this to you—when I had hunted all summer, fall, and winter, always with her image in my head, and finally found her on the last island in the Atlantic, near the village of Los Llanos de Aridane, I want you all to know, and we were celebrating that evening, the two of us in the San Petronio restaurant—if you need these details—where I told her for the first time who her father was and that her father was alive: toward midnight, then, as today in the Milano Real Dos of Pedrada, when she had gone off for a little while, perhaps out to the street, to a boyfriend or someone, suddenly there was a young woman next to me, just as you are now, in profile, and I wondered, and not just for a moment, what this beautiful stranger was doing at my table; from what country she had washed up on this remote island; and how it happened that the stranger seemed so motherless and fatherless, or without any need of parents? And why, although it was not cold in the restaurant, a shiver kept running over her forearms, making the little hairs there stand on end?

  “And turn your face to me now: Yes, she is the one. Yes, you are the one. And that man there in the ermine cloak, representing the abdicated king and emperor on the way to his final resting place on the southern flank of the Gredos, I greet as my grandfather from the village back home. He was a singer, but—if you want to know—not a singer of folk songs. Just like that old singer, you hold your head very high and will sing us something in a few minutes, with your high-pitched voice, as effortlessly and uninsistently as only an old singer can, nothing but pure voice, with at most a quarter of an eye on us. And just as with that singer in the last days of his life, together with your ermine and your gold-braided waistcoat, a strong odor emanates from you, almost a stench.”

  “Do you walk in your sleep?” (Here a question interjected by the former feature-article author.)—She: “I always have. And I see the itinerant stonemason there, or whatever he represents, as my brother, on the verge of killing a person for the first time. At the moment it is still just a ghost of a notion in him. But as soon as he speaks it out loud, he will, willy-nilly, be held to it and veritably obliged to do the deed. It was already the same with your violence toward objects, which landed you in the penitentiary: for a long time destruction was only one of your thoughts among many—but as soon as you had put it in words to one person, then another, then everyone you knew, it had to happen someday; you had no choice; no sooner said than done; having said it meant having to do it.”

  The stonemason, now revealing his feelings: “Never fear, sister. I will not say it, not tonight. But it is true: time and again I have been close to speaking the words, especially lately. Just a slip of the tongue, and the word would have been out there, with all the guards listening. And you, sister, made no small contribution to my destructive rage. Of course it is also true that in our village days you exercised forethought for me, foresaw for me, kindly forestalled things for me, forecast the coming day and the coming year, with my interests at heart.

  “And it is also true that you never wanted anything for yourself, or at least not for yourself only. Everything you undertook was undertaken for the sake of someone else, also several someone elses, but primarily for the sake of me, the parentless child, the orphan. And although you were also an orphan, you did not see yourself as one, not once; as a child you were already self-sufficient, independent, the child of no one, the descend
ant of no ancestors, from the outset a person without any frame of reference: as little a villager as a person defined by the Slavic minority or the German nation, and then not someone from the economics department, either, or a person whose manner gave the slightest hint that she was a tycoon, just as you never behaved in a sisterly fashion, or as a lover—but that is something of which neither I nor anyone else has any knowledge, perhaps least of all your lover himself, if he in fact exists. You defied definition; you stood, moved, and acted solely and exclusively somewhere outside/on the periphery.

  “Everything you did, as you conceived it, had to be done for someone else’s sake, and at the time this someone was above all me, the orphan. It was impossible for you simply to do, look for, collect something without the thought that it was for me. But that did not stem from goodness, or from any intention to be helpful and useful—you just were, and are, that way; that is your nature, and perhaps, I often thought, your need to do things for others, and the way you become incapable of lifting a finger when you lose the image of a person, or persons, is even a sort of defect—your own personal sickness. Even in the old days, whenever you had to buy something, it could not be for you, even if you needed the item; and not until the idea of buying something or other came to you in connection with me could you set out to make the purchase.

  “To pick an apple hanging just outside your window and eat it was out of the question, out of the realm of possibility: but to scramble up to the most precarious treetop for some fruit or other, so long as it was for me—no hesitation! And out in the woods you never popped the wild strawberries, or whatever you were picking there, straight into your mouth, not a single one: no matter how luscious you found all the little fruits of the field, no matter how avid you always were for the fruit and berries—you were capable of picking, hunting, and gathering only when thinking of someone other than yourself. And how dispirited and unmotivated you became when it was a question of harvesting only for yourself! That is sick, sister.

  “And just as it is said of some people that they ‘do not know how to share,’ you, with this sickness of yours, sister, had the opposite compulsion—to share all the time. You no sooner got something in your hand, somehow or other, than you were already offering it to me or someone else—everyone in your vicinity—so as to share it. This gesture was completely involuntary; you could not help yourself—you had to share. Sometimes I experienced your gesture of sharing as aggression—you pushed the thing to be shared in my face, thrusting your arm at me violently. It was as if you had to crush me, and, later, various other people, against your ribs—

  “One time you told me how you pictured yourself dying: while saving someone else’s life. Ah, my poor sick sister. And you crushed me against your ribs in an entirely different way, too: by standing in for the father, not ours but one from the Old Testament. Just as the Old Testament fathers were ordered to beat their sons preemptively, again and again, so that evil would have no chance to take root in them, or would be nipped in the bud, you beat me in those days even before I did anything wrong, prophylactically.

  “And I, and I, and I? How little I can say about myself, and then almost only what I am not. I am not like you—if for no other reason than that from the beginning I saw myself in relation to others, measured myself against others, compared myself with others, defined myself with reference to others. I was a villager if ever there was one. I was a Slav, or simply what was considered Slavic. I became a servant of God if ever an orphaned Slavic villager became one. And then, always a child of my time, or not of my time, and continuing to understand myself almost exclusively in relation to my contemporaries and in reaction to the spirit of the times, I became a destroyer.”

  The stonemason or wanderer fell silent for a while, took a deep breath, and then resumed speaking: “For a very long time in my life I hardly lived from within myself. Whatever I did or failed to do, wherever I was: I was dependent on someone or something else. A few dependencies actually helped me stand on my own two feet and enriched me. These were more like safety nets, signposts, lifelines, reference points. But the majority of my dependencies did not strengthen me but diminished me. That was especially true of my dependency on people.

  “I do not know why, when I found myself in the company of others, and perhaps not even reluctantly, I would instantly feel like their slave, or at least like a subordinate. In the twinkling of an eye I would be transformed into an appendage or accessory; did not exist on my own; just flailed at the end of the more or less imaginary leash that tied me to the other person, or was transfixed, in a bad sense, under the person’s spell, paralyzed.

  “And each time this flailing or paralysis also made itself evident, too. Even when I was with strangers, on streets, in subways, in stadiums, I no longer acted but only reacted, magnetically attracted to the others, slavish, unfree. Even my way of walking, looking, standing, sitting, was determined entirely by my reaction to the walking, looking, standing, and so on of my fellow pedestrians, fellow onlookers, fellow travelers. Either I imitated them slavishly or I did the exact opposite, another form of slavish behavior: when they ran, I walked with exaggerated slowness; when they all looked into the arena, I pointedly looked away, at the sky or their faces, and so forth.

  “Even in the presence of animals, especially that of pets, cats, dogs, cows, hens, rabbits, I fell into this kind of dependency and lost my freedom, fell under the spell of animal eyes, under the spell of animal movements. It was almost only in dealings with inanimate objects that I escaped from this flailing and paralysis under the yoke of others. Lacking any connection to others came to be the freedom that could replenish me. To create a frieze, consisting of the gazes of contemporaries! To be splendidly relieved of relationships, I thought, would mean to be ripe for what is real.

  “As a stonemason I knew I was free of the community tether at least for the duration of my workday, yet not entirely alone. But soon even at work I fell into a kind of dependency, though one that for a while propped me up instead of crushing me: constantly stumbling in the others’ present, and in the present altogether, I decided, as a stonemason, and this time not slavishly but full of determination, of my own free will, to forge a relationship with the historical period that I saw as most suited to me, the Middle Ages.”

  The mason paused. He took another deep breath. Not a soul interrupted him. He resumed his narrative, in a voice seemingly not emanating from him, with no visible movement of his lips, although in no way with the ghostly quality of a ventriloquist.

  “I made up my mind not to be a person of the present day, to be someone not of today. I wanted to be, and then actually was, associated with the stone structures, and even more with the stone sculptures, from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth European centuries. These faces, whose ears often stuck out, whose noses looked squashed, whose lips were thick, whose eyes protruded from their sockets, these were my people. They absolved me, and I, crisscrossing Europe for years, on one pilgrimage after another, from one extended family carved in stone to the other, absolved myself in their company, face-to-face, listened to them, let them infect me with that thick-lipped grinning, that way of listening while attending to what was going on inside one, with that imperturbable yet quietly empathetic gaze, which registered me and my background at once playfully and kindly.

  “For whole days and years my sole contact, my exclusive communication, was with those stone dream-dancers, fortunately seldom hewn out of marble, mostly out of granite or a more friable stone. And, listen, all of you, I did not become eccentric as a result, but rather, through my daily involvement with them, I shook off any kind of eccentricity from earlier. And in silent conversation, face-to-face—yes, in their presence I felt my own blurry, slack face broaden, tighten, organize itself—I aired out my skull, into the farthest recesses of my brain, and then set out on my path with a clarity and energy such as I had rarely experienced, no, never experienced, in conversations with flesh-and-blood human beings.

 
“In the company of people from the Middle Ages, my chosen era, engaged day in, day out in dialogue, which was accompanied by tapping, sniffing, tracing their outlines, mimicking, in dialogue with my chosen people, which had long since ceased to be limited to those figures and works in stone, having expanded to include the heroic epics from that era, their plots continuing in me, as well as the illuminated initials in the old manuscripts and such, I envisioned spending the rest of my life in this period and passing my days on earth both peacefully and fruitfully, without ever again coming into contact, let alone collision, with present-day contemporaries, not a single one.”

  And this was the moment when, out of the clear blue sky, the stonemason and wanderer spread his arms before the Argentinian or Sardinian woman sitting next to him, or whatever she was, and the pale young woman, with a blush engulfing her entire face, let herself fall against him. He hugged her. She threw her arms around him. The story tells us she embraced him. And he, as the story tells us further, locked his arms around her so tightly that she uttered a noise that sounded, though only in the first moment, like a wail. They held each other.

  Or did the apparent wail actually come from him, or did it come from both of them? Or did it come from the male storyteller, or the female storyteller? And the story goes that the two of them remained in that position, eye to eye, as the wanderer and/or stonemason resumed his tale.

  “But now it is all over with me and the Middle Ages. And the story of my involvement with the stone faces did not end only today—although perhaps it is not being fully recounted until today. The end of my relationship with them, and along with it that particular relationship to the world altogether, did not occur unexpectedly. These stone and painted and written models of composure, of fervent acceptance, of surrender, and of confident and sun-bright reason, which I saw as quintessentially medieval, inseparable from their hip angulation, faded only gradually, almost imperceptibly, did not leave me all at once, did not cease communication with me from one day to the next.