by Peter Handke
The author countered by asking how it happened, then, that she had incurred so much hostility, and he added that in his eyes, becoming “childlike” in sleep, and in general, did not at all mean being a good person, or an unsuspecting person, or a pure person, at least not in his experience of “contemporary children”; and then he told her that at one time he had had an opinion of sleepers not so different from her own. But over the years he had noticed, and specifically in himself, that in sleep the momentary surges of hate he experienced while awake, likewise the outbursts of anger and hostility, had not fallen silent as in his earlier years but had erupted even more forcefully.
And by now, he said, evil raged in him even more furiously at night, while he was sleeping, than during the day, when he had tried-and-true techniques for shooing it away whenever it showed its face: lacking any such technique as a sleeper—no matter how much he practiced before closing his eyes—he sometimes roared and bared his teeth, or did so at least in his dreams, all night long at someone he did not know, or darted into a crowd of strangers brandishing a knife, thus embodying only the worst of all possible worlds and in the end feeling nothing but relief at waking up. “It seems to me that today we sleepers are to be feared. Steer clear of sleepers, even those who seem peaceful and quiet! You no sooner bend over them than they will jump up and stab you.”
She was keeping watch. Was she keeping watch? She sat up. She stood up. She walked up and down inside the main tent. Not a sound from the Sierra. Even the tributaries of the río Tormes had fallen silent, as if switched off, or as if they no longer reached her ears.
In her early days back there in the riverport city, at night she had heard every train, no matter how distant, and every steamer’s whistle blowing at night—and after a few months, after a few years, nothing.
So she had been in the innermost reaches of the Sierra that long already? Eyes wide open, for true dreaming! (“Avoid the word ‘true,’” she dictated to the author, “instead use ‘comprehensive.’”) So eyes wide open for comprehensive dreaming. It was the last hour of the night, and as so often she had the notion that a final decision was about to be made, something good or something terrible, a decision affecting not her alone but indeed the entire planet. It was also the hour when the earth always became most perceptible to her as a planet, a newborn one—dependent on its solar system and yet alone in the universe, as alone as anything can be, vulnerable, perilously vulnerable: precisely in this hour it would tip, not, as usual, toward day but into so-called eternal night. Decision? Turning point? Eyes open. Among the constellations of the northern hemisphere—Orion, the Pleiades, the Great Bear—the Southern Cross, actually not visible in these parts, inserted itself, as if gently slipped in.
That snake, no longer than her forearm, as narrow as her little finger, patterned in yellow and black like a salamander, which she had encountered during one of her previous crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, when she stumbled yet again in the trackless wilderness without being able to brake herself, at this moment slithered away in a leisurely fashion—no raising of its head or darting of its tongue at her—and, as she tumbled downhill, let her slide by in the scree, stepped aside (“Can one say of a snake that it stepped?”) ahead of her, leisurely and gracefully.
Poisonous though it was, the snake had not frightened her when she fell toward it: that moment with the viper had even been a helpful one during that crazy hike through the Sierra: with the help of the snake she had achieved equanimity where previously she had been almost too cocksure, also hasty and not always mindful while walking or beating her way forward, and from the viper moment on, she maintained her composure, step after step, even if later she briefly lost her footing time and again. She had borrowed from her snake the rhythm she needed to wend her way out of the rocky maze, which, when one found oneself in it, sometimes seemed to offer no escape. And long after the crossing she drew on or called up the image of the snake to stay on top of certain situations, or simply to remain focused and to follow through on something, intensely and calmly, not allowing herself to be deflected from her course, yet concentrating entirely on the moment, on the now, now, now …
And once again from far, far away in the eastern village the image came to her of herself, the older sister, pushing the baby carriage with her summer-naked brother in it, still a nursling (nursing at whose breasts now, after the accidental death of their mother?), and losing her grip on the carriage, which plunged off the path and tipped over the bank, into the jungle-like thicket of tall stinging nettles there, and again she plunged after the vanished brother-bundle into the dark-green, hairy nettle flames.
And once more she plucked at the unknown love of her life, lying facedown in the damp steppe grass, then stepped over his body, again and again, back and forth, back and forth, and asked him why he was so afraid that she would suck out his blood.
And on her estate, the former stagecoach relay station, on the edge of the riverport city, long since left behind by her, sparks from horseshoes pierced the darkness, the piles of pots in the kitchen shifted, the quinces, the kwite, the dunje, the safardzali, rolled among the piles of laundry, no letter lay on the bare table, no one played with the toys set up in her vanished child’s nursery.
And out here, among the dozens of brooks, rose thousands of mossy mounds, apparent islands, the turbari, softer than soft, which, when someone stepped on them, slowly twisted and sank, now, now, into the depths, into the bogginess, into the bog.
And the author in his village in La Mancha, in the chamber with the narrow cot, against the windowless wall, he, too, on his stomach, his hand over his eyes in his sleep, as if the night were not yet dark enough for him, him of all people.
“I have nothing to do with banking anymore, at least not as it is today,” she told him later. “And yet I am preoccupied with the idea of founding a new kind of bank—an image bank, a worldwide one, for the exchange, use, and investment of all my, your, and our images—” But when the author urged her to expand upon her project a little, as so often, she broke off her flight of fancy when it had hardly got off the ground.
23
But then the new day after all. The feeder brooks once more audible. The tent crowd holding a brief farewell meeting, out of doors in the morning mountain air in front of the Milano Real of Pedrada.
Each person also drank his coffee or whatever outdoors, from porcelain cups, yogurt containers, toothbrush glasses. She, the heroine, adventurer, or vagabond, had her Blue Mountain Coffee from Jamaica with her as always, which she shared with one person or another: a rich black oily gleam, that mirrored the summit plain of the Sierra. It was wrong to be stingy with these most precious of beans: if you used too few of them, the coffee would turn out more bitter and weak than any other coffee.
No one ate. Although it was allegedly winter and, according to the thermometer, a chilly morning, no clouds of breath showed in front of people’s mouths, just as in certain films where snow and a wintry landscape are a mere backdrop; only the beverages were steaming.
Now everyone here would set out by himself, or remain on the spot, or take the early bus, already waiting in the orchard, back to the plains and the cities.
Despite the bright daylight, not a single inhabitant of Pedrada was to be seen; the tents closed up tightly, as were the gray wooden shutters on the ancient granite-block houses: yet a living, breathing stillness (in his report, the observer, sent by the World Council, or whomever, who now burst out of his observer’s tent for his morning run, five to ten times around the colony, would characterize it as “hopeless,” “unmotivated,” “apathetic,” “eccentric”).
No one spoke at first. That night of dying and being dead had apparently had a good effect on the emperador, emperor, king, or the historical reenactor playing that role—perhaps a local historian from the provinces here, in his civilian profession a savings-bank employee who thought he would gain insight into the past through this role-playing: he decided not to continue the journey in th
e litter; would cover on foot the rest of the way to the retreat of Charles V and I, without the real or artificial ermine cloak, together with his four colleagues from the Caja de Ahorros (= savings bank) in Piedrahita or elsewhere, who would no longer have to carry him.
The medieval stonemason and the young woman no longer on the lookout for anyone’s story but her own—never again would she blush—stood with their arms around each other, as if since they first touched one another that night they had not been a finger’s breadth or a hairsbreadth apart, when sitting, then falling down, then lying, later getting up, and now stepping outside: not a chink between these two Siamese bodies. How would it end? Well, there was enough for the stone man to do here in Pedrada (= place of stones), and her simultaneous and parallel activity could at least cause no harm.
And the terribly young couple? Overnight they had become adults, he broad-shouldered, with a suitable hat, she visibly also larger, with a proud womanly face and wider pelvis, from which her stomach already protruded a little with their second child, while in the morning light the firstborn now appeared to have grown out of his diapers, having become a year or more older during the night, now able to stand on both legs, walk, hop over one of the feeder brooks of the río Tormes; and if his mouth did not yet produce any recognizable words, his eyes were already speaking, taking in everything that happened, could have said things about the others that they themselves did not even guess or know. Soon he would board the bus with his parents and sit between them during the entire trip and remain to the end, come what might, surrounded by these parents of his.
In the moment of parting they finally spoke. A strangely animated farewell for a group that had come together by chance, and so fleetingly. How full of enthusiasm each person there seemed, for himself, for the path ahead, as well as for the others and their very different paths. And hadn’t they all been enthusiastic at one time, when? through and through, about nothing in particular, without a particular destination or adventure, simply enthusiastic, about nothing, nothing at all? When? As infants? Yes, as infants, long ago, in their time. Yes, in their time—but when was that?—hadn’t all of us new arrivals in the world presented ourselves as enthusiastic? Wasn’t there a time or a story in which everyone was born enthusiastic, with an enthusiasm meant for the long haul? But why did it seem now as though these people, coming into the world enthusiastic, the enthusiastic newborns, were the rarest of the rare? And what has become of all those who were enthusiastic in their day, those destined to remain youthful even as they aged, and all the more so, people to whom the adjective “young” applied as to no others?
But even if a hint or spirit of continuity was nowhere to be found anymore, at least there was the sporadic or episodic enthusiasm of parting. Every person thanked every other one, just like that, for nothing in particular. And each asked every other one to say hello for him to the place for which he was setting out, even if the place was unfamiliar to the person sending greetings.
She, however, knew the Yuste Monastery, several days’ journey away, on the southern side, at the foot of the Sierra, below the lowest and easiest of the passes through the mountains, the Puerto de Tornavacas, and she gave the emperador this charge: “Say hello for me to the holm oaks, to the pool in the garden, to the giant palms, and especially to the sparrows, who are so absent from the northern Sierra, on the northern side of the djebel.”—He: “Also to the mausoleum and the sarcophagus?”—She: “No.” And laying her hand on his shoulder, she stole, without his noticing, the soft tiger-striped falcon’s feather from his ermine. And each person wished the other—a seemingly efficacious wishing—what he had secretly already wished for himself. Even if the stories they had launched together would not continue—so what? at least they had been launched.
This morning hardly anything suggested that the cones of mud and wood had served as an inn overnight; no sign, either “El Milano Real” or any other. By daylight the tent resembled all the others in Pedrada, except that it was somewhat larger. And by day it was only their (approximate) tent form that set apart all the new buildings that had appeared here since her last visit from the square houses that had been here before: all through the settlement the building materials, the mud, the blocks of wood, the granite ashlar, were the same, all the roofs here consisting of broom twigs and cork-tree bark, densely layered to make them rainproof and, with their stone weights, as storm-resistant as any roofing tiles—which were completely absent, both the flat ones of the north and the curved tiles of the south, as if Pedrada, and indeed the whole Sierra, no longer belonged to a specific geographical area.
The innkeeper of the previous night had been transformed into the bus driver again, who now drove over from the orchard and waited with his Cyclopean dog in front of the main tent for the passengers. And already these were coming from all parts of the seemingly fast-asleep village, long since ready for the trip, some of them also from beyond the tents and houses, from above, from the higher and apparently empty, treeless, and uninhabited elevations, loaded down with heavy bags, hanging every which way, dragging suitcases or, a bizarre sight on the trackless slopes with the ridges in the background, pulling them along on wheels.
And hardly any of those setting out on a long journey to town were unaccompanied. Although each was leaving the Sierra by himself, he was surrounded until he boarded the bus by a swarm of near and dear (who were perhaps not relatives at all, merely “near and dear” for the purpose of keeping him company).
It was still very early. Not a soul outside, except for the dense crowd of people saying their goodbyes around the windows of the bus, which because of the throng on all sides now seemed to be standing on a square disproportionately large for this mountain village. Despite the crowd, the scene was fairly quiet. Only now and then could a louder word be heard, and for the most part people’s lips merely moved, delivering silent messages, whether inside behind the glass or outside on the square.
The driver had meanwhile left the bus and disappeared somewhere; his seat the only one not occupied. Behind the bus, the crest of the mountain, with a cloud bank to the south, the bank stalled, a so-called barrier cloud—as one of the companions explained to the person he was accompanying, as if to distract him from their parting, as the latter stood hesitantly on the bus step.
These were special farewells, bearing no resemblance to the cheerful goodbyes among the members of the fortuitous group. The necessity of parting forever, or for an undetermined length of time, now hung over them, after they had been so close, which here in their Sierra had always been precarious. These people inside and outside of the bus, taking final leave of each other only with their eyes, wide open, without winking or blinking, had survived something together in this place, something so terrifying and incomprehensible that it surpassed any local epidemics, famines, or natural disasters, something every moment of which would remain indelibly imprinted on their collective memory; memory? the present, memory as a present that would continue to rage. And after a shared survival like this, the necessity of parting was all the more painful: from now on, this person here and that person there would have to survive alone, bitterly alone with his remembering, with this experience constantly before his eyes.
The bus driver’s return. The door closing. Pulling out. The accompanying friends rapidly disappearing. The square cleared. Along with the haze of bitterness, the square remaining filled with a powerful, lingering sense of intimacy or—equally heartrending—affection, which she, the fruit and feather thief, the last person left on the square, thought she could taste with her tongue and palate. “Really? Tasting a feeling?”—“Yes, feelings as sustenance! And what sustenance! It just depends on the feeling.” Above the square, on the mountain crest far in the background, still the thick wall of the barrier cloud. And an apple had been lying on the roof of the bus.
Later, during her visit to the author in his village in La Mancha, she proposed another title for their book: The Liturgy of Preservation. Even very early in her
life, it had pained her to leave a place that meant something to her. Not so much her village or one of the other places where she had spent time, but some way station or other, where, for a brief moment, “life had appeared” (didn’t that phrase occur in one of the Gospels?), or where for a moment one had felt a breath of something, if only from a wind-tossed tree outside the window.
She had experienced pain, not for herself, the one who now had to leave the place, but for the place itself, “in person.” She sensed, she thought, the place needed her and her attention, her scrutiny, her involvement in and appreciation for as many particulars as possible—something that went beyond recording, posting, and adding. That was how it should be, for the place deserved recognition, as well as gratitude; that was fitting (“Do people still say that?”—the author).
And thus every time she set out from such a “coach stage,” she felt she must—observe again her smile at this “I must”—record the place visually, one look at a time and at every step. Wherever she went, or, as now, stood still, she impressed upon herself one spot and one thing (such as a person) after another; she noted the number of steps leading up to a front door here, the creaking of a wooden staircase there; took in the color of a rock, the shape of a door handle, the smell from a sewer grating, and so on: a consistent process despite the marked differences among the objects “entrusted” to her, which lent a coherence and a rhythm to the way station she was about to leave, a process she referred to as the “liturgy of preservation,” and which she wanted the author to translate into images and sentences, into the coherence and rhythms of prose, so that it might endure as long as possible. “Yes, I am seeking whatever eternity is possible for human beings,” she told the author, who replied, “And I want to be transitory,” whereupon she could be heard to say, “That is not a difference or a contradiction.”
Accordingly, that morning she surveyed Pedrada, the stone-casting settlement. She must not make a sound; must not wake anyone. Downriver on the Tormes, mill wheels were turning, new ones, which had nothing to do with the mills from previous centuries, in ruins now, overgrown with brush. Electrical pylons marched in from the opening of the valley, far off to the west, where the town of El Barco de Ávila lay, making their way up here, likewise new, as if installed overnight.
