Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  In the same fashion she decided that morning in Pedrada not to duck the hostility anymore. Instead she plunged straight into it. And the knife-throwers made her a present of the knives? Yes. One did, at least—it was a very tiny knife, by the way, with a blade hardly longer than a thumbnail. And the stone-throwers ceased to throw stones? Yes, when she threw stones herself, one of which collided in midair with a stone tossed by one of her presumptive enemies. What a sound, and what a peaceful silence after that.

  In the center of the stone-casting village, where she went into a shop-tent that also housed a bar, she promptly elbowed her way to the spot most crowded with potential attackers, and, after a critical moment (for which there was a special word in that region, trance), during which the faces grew more savage by several degrees—the eyes blazing like nests of dragons—hands reached for her from all sides, tugging, plucking, pulling, stroking her hair, her cheeks, her shoulders.

  Yes, the people of Pedrada reached for her this way out of joy. What had appeared to be hatred and rage in their faces had in actuality been distrust, and not born merely of the current situation—a seemingly chronic disappointment vis-à-vis the rest of the world. She was the one walking around this village with evil in mind, she who had come from elsewhere, the stranger. The settlers in Pedrada expected nothing but the worst from those who came from elsewhere. And no sooner was she standing among them, no sooner did she look around her, than instead of beating her, they plucked, scratched, and jostled her, shouted and spit-sprayed her, out of sheer excitement, eagerness to talk, cordiality and hospitality. Disarming people simply by looking around? Yes. And yet she did not look at anyone in particular. No one felt personally targeted by her gaze. Her gaze merely brushed each one.

  It was quite rare, by the way, for her to look someone in the eye. And it happened most rarely with a man. But when it did! Once in a lifetime! Woe unto me. What a lucky man I am! There was that one time when he was pierced by her wrathful gaze, from the depths of a wound that cut into him like his own. No, not a wrathful gaze—rather a pure and simple opening of the eyes, not so much aimed at the man as dedicated to him and intended for him; that blackest of full gazes with which she surrenders entirely and at the same time calls on the man, me, me? for help, silently, and at the same time, with the same widening of her eyes, places trust in me as in no one else, or am I deceiving myself? a trust to which to the end of my days I shall do more than merely be equal, for which I will be the rock. But did I manage to be that?

  And now no help for it but to return to the episode in the bar-shop with her and the Sierra folk. By looking around, the stranger had mollified these people, who generally felt passed over and despised, and made them whole; with her in their midst, they no longer felt marginalized. Although she, this beautiful and well-intentioned guest—at long last such a guest—merely glanced or looked sideways at us natives or settlers, reputed to be obstinate and backward, and who therefore actually were this way at times—her idiosyncrasy, to turn her profile toward each of us as she looked—or even looked us up and down, which, since the days when Homer’s single combatants faced each other before wielding their weapons, has signified disrespect and arrogance, or merely glanced fleetingly around, her eyes invisible behind a veil (afterward each of us will have imagined a different eye color for her), we knew our value had been raised by her scrutiny. No, we were not the way the observers portrayed us, and beneath the gaze of our dear guest we were no longer forced to play that role. For once we could be high-spirited. And in this high-spiritedness, which to our regret lasted far too short a time, we recognized that this was no exception but rather one of the most valid and exemplary things we deserved, part of our worth, part of our tradition. Under the gaze of this particular person, we were no longer shriveled nonentities, but each of us lived in his own space and breathed his innate and indigenous time.

  The story tells us that the people of Pedrada did not want to let their guest depart. And we are told that at the parting one person hung around her neck a medallion with the white angel (but wasn’t that her own?). And the story tells of a couple of others who bickered high-spiritedly over which of them would escort the stranger up to the crest of the Sierra (yet of those who wanted to climb up there with her, none had yet ventured to the peaks, in this respect more strangers to the mountains than the guest, and when they finally set out, she, the new one here, was repeatedly asked for directions, even before they left the center of the village, even just to get around the corner). And the story tells of local children, who, unlike big-city street children nowadays, did not budge from the woman’s side as she eventually set out alone, but gazed at her expectantly, hand in hand with her (children from the very horde that had previously pelted her with stones?). And she, according to the story, continued to recognize in each of her hosts someone she had met in another part of the world, primarily those from the northwestern riverport city, here the outskirts idiot, there her would-be lover (and she remarked to herself that moving to the air and light of these remote inner regions of the Sierra de Gredos had not done them any harm).

  And here is the place to insert the reporter’s account of his visit to the Pedrada region. Enough glorification, which, as he wrote in the introduction, amounted to the same thing as obfuscation. It had been his assignment, he wrote, simply to observe, rather than to glorify and prematurely pave the way for a conciliatory attitude toward these people, which might actually make things worse.

  In his reporting, he said, he had been guided exclusively by the recognized and accepted rules of rational thought. To be sure, now and then feelings had slipped in among the sober observations—indeed, it had sometimes been almost impossible to “ward off” feelings—but there was no place for them in a purely rational account, not even as a “makeshift device.” No feelings. Or at least not allowing oneself to be [mis]led by them. They merely distorted the given facts, disfiguring them and destroying their structure.

  Similarly he had avoided in his report all evocations of atmosphere. To place particular emphasis on the atmosphere of a region under analysis would falsify the actual circumstances and veil the causes of local problems. Atmospherics were fine for the soccer field and the circus, “or, as far as I am concerned, for a Western or an adventure story, but not a research project intended to elicit facts or establish the truth.” Feelings, like atmosphere, were incompatible with the urgently needed information on the Pedrada region, from which almost nothing but rumors reached the outside world. And likewise any fleeting images or scraps of words picked up in the course of a day did not constitute hard facts.

  Incidentals and details unrelated to the main point: dozens of these had come to his attention during his stay in Pedrada. He had repeatedly been at risk of being distracted by them from his assignment, which called for capturing the essentials, had been at risk of ascribing to insignificant factors and small incidental images a meaning that they by no means possessed and above all were “not allowed to have,” as far as the problem of Pedrada and the Sierra de Gredos was concerned.

  Even now, as he was compiling his report, the reporter admitted, images were constantly breaking or barging their way in among the rational statements, “in veritable toadlike fashion,” “and likewise in dark swarms,” not only inappropriate, deviant, and confused, but also illogical or at least intent on keeping him from staying on track, images “like will-o’-the-wisps or demons!” And such images, intermittently flashing and flickering, were not information, and certainly not the information that was called for. The facts and “the disjointed interior worlds of images” were “mortal enemies.”

  The same was true, he wrote, of knowledge and intuition. In his report, his assignment was to transmit what he knew to be proven, documented, witnessed, and certified as far as the Pedrada population was concerned. Anything intuited had to be omitted, “alas.” Yes, he wrote “alas”: for quite a few of the intuitions that had come to him while he shared his life with the Sierra folk had impressed
him at least as powerfully as all his accumulated factual knowledge; these “intuitions that unexpectedly came flying to me” had from time to time been even more convincing than the known facts, in defiance of the laws of rational thought. Intuitions “like eagles’ shadows, or at least the shadows of raptors, which threatened to darken my reason.” Above all, no making things up out of thin air. Both feet on the ground.

  And it went without saying—thus he ended the introduction to his report—that in the following compilation of data and statistics, geared toward ease of understanding and general applicability or usefulness, dreams had no place—“although it must be admitted here that during my assignment in the innermost Sierra, probably as a result of the altitude, I dreamed as nowhere else (although my life as a reporter has taken me to the most remote and dream-stricken corners of our planet): dreams that pursued and persecuted me all day during my fieldwork, and often thoroughly muddled this work, along with the data and facts. But it is also out of the question that these dreams—what an unfamiliar pounding of my heart they caused, and still cause—should be considered straightforward information that leads to the heart of the matter.”

  According to the reporter’s account, the life of the Pedrada settlers was primarily characterized by regression to forms of civilization thought to have been long since left behind. “Among the population, one can observe a degree of atavism unequaled anywhere else, not merely in Europe, but in the entire modern world, now well advanced into the twenty-first century.”

  This atavism, he wrote, was evident already in the fact that none of the inhabitants cared what was happening outside the borders of his region. The local station, whether radio or television, carried almost exclusively local news. The satellite dishes, as numerous here as elsewhere, served only to receive broadcasts of old movies. People were uninformed, either about the shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean, or the floods in Alaska, or the bombing of the Eiffel Tower. There was no newspaper, and if one happened to find its way to the village from elsewhere, brought, for instance, by a bus passenger, it went unread. The few announcements were disseminated orally, as in much earlier times, on Sundays after mass, after the Shabbat service, after Friday prayers in the mosque.

  Further evidence of regression was the rejection of cashless financial transactions and indeed any kind of banking. All that prevented the reintroduction of piggy banks and money chests was the fact that no one saved, let alone hoarded valuables: the money in the region was in constant circulation, with uninterrupted buying and selling, in the course of which objects and money passed from hand to hand without anyone’s thinking to amass capital with which to undertake some long-term project or gain a substantial advantage over others.

  The atavism was such that even the old-fangled barter system was sending forth its sickly tendrils on the entire northern side of the Sierra de Gredos, which in any case suffered from sun deprivation. More childishly than children, the Pedrada population would spend hours haggling over barters, which exchanges, once they were concluded, were so crazy and pointless that merchants from the outside world—though none came—would have had an easier time of it with these ninnies than Columbus with the West Indians, Pizarro with the Incas, or Cortés with the Mayas or the Aztecs. One person bartered a gold pocket watch for a chess piece made not even of ivory or crystal but of wood. The one who had received the gold watch promptly exchanged it for a glass marble, for which he was offered by the next person a bench, a first edition of Don Quixote, or a crate of apples allegedly blessed by one of the hermits up on the crest of the Sierra, and so it went in the local bartering frenzy.

  What was more worrisome was that the inhabitants of Pedrada and its surroundings still lived as people had before the discovery of play. True, in their daily dealings and in their evening leisure activities they displayed something oddly playful—every head movement was playful, likewise every placement of their feet, every blink, every exchange of objects, even the words that they literally sent flying back and forth among themselves—but beyond that they never played an actual game, and apparently knew of and were acquainted with none (the chess piece, like a ball, a deck of poker cards, a Ping-Pong paddle, was merely an object of exchange).

  And “since they never played particular games—or if they did perhaps play, without any rules—the people of Pedrada seemed imprisoned in their own countries, not deflected for a moment from their separate and isolated existences, in which, without any social games, they had no opportunity to escape from themselves even for a while, or, by way of the much-needed detour provided by regulated play, to interact with their fellow human beings freely and uninhibitedly, and the result was that they—a serious regression—had all mutated into those ‘idiots,’ which might be translated literally as ‘go-it-aloners’ or ‘odd ducks,’ for whom the first progressive society, the Greek polis, had had no room within its system”—by which the reporter meant to suggest that membership in contemporary societies, whose model “of course had to be the polis,” was out of the question for the entire population of P., a straggling horde of obsolete idiots, too stupid to play.

  Even more worrisome, the outside reporter continued, was that the legal and judicial system in the Comarca of Pedrada was no longer based on the world or universal convention that had finally been adopted everywhere else, but that these people—certainly at the behest of precisely those who had moved here from the most advanced civilizations!—had reverted to a concept of neighborhood justice, for the regulation and enforcement of “local coexistence,” that had allegedly held sway in the mountains in olden times and had been preserved there: a system not even captured in writing and codified, but merely passed down from one generation to the next in some obscure fashion.

  In the Sierra de Gredos, according to the report, respect for one’s neighborhood, for the other person’s, the neighbor’s, space, had become the starting point for all decisions as to what was allowed and what was prohibited—and that among these idiots, who skittishly kept to themselves!—a principle now almost “sacred” to these people, like the law of hospitality and the law of “niceness” (!) (as if they wanted to turn their backs in willful defiance on the present and take refuge in a dark, gloomy past).

  Yes, in this remote world an unwritten law was in effect, in all seriousness: when it came to one’s neighbor, good repute—or none at all—or complete silence about the person; but in particular: not a word about a foreigner, no matter how unwelcome. Wherever Pedradeños (they had another name for themselves, but they guarded it jealously) came together, as usual looking past one another, over each other’s shoulders, into space, their topic was generally those who were absent, their neighbors from the upper, middle, or lower feeder brooks of the río Tormes, and the murmuring, whispering, and growling, accentuated by the hissing, guttural, fricative, and spitting sounds characteristic of the Sierra, had as its subject, if not various legendary heroes or other whimsies, the positive and lovable features of various fellow residents, as well as their lovable defects and mistakes—apparently only the lovable kind could be mentioned.

  How well these others all came off in such conversations, how seemingly human and as if without negative qualities—anyone listening without preconceptions, and without the blinders of an obsolete, narrow, artificially revived law based on custom and tradition, had to be filled with doubt from the outset—when the reporter was privy to such obstinately favorable comments on others, he almost felt like bursting out laughing, almost. How beautifully white XY’s hair had turned over the past year. How he and his wife still loved each other after a quarter of a century, still held hands and opened doors for each other. How so-and-so’s children were even more beautiful than their mother, who was a beauty herself, what a beauty. How forever young this woman looked, like women in medieval epics. How what’s-his-name was always so punctual about pruning his fruit trees. How kindly he had left a bottle of sparkling cider outside the speaker’s window yesterday. How attractive the new color of his window
shutters was. How reassuring it was to hear the man next door banging the garage door shut every evening, or to pass every day the large family’s laundry just hung out to dry, with the rips and holes in the clothing and socks—this morning only single stockings, all missing their mates! What a pleasure to hear the voice of a newborn behind the fence, to see the freshly polished shoes in the attic window across the way, to smell the eldest daughter’s perfume through the wild broom, to find, upon coming home, yet another ball in one’s own tent garden or courtyard and to be able to toss it back into the garden next door.

  What a happy feeling to know that one’s neighbors were home again when they had been away—a rare occurrence in these parts—or on vacation—an even greater rarity, to see their vehicles in their parking spaces, their colors all matching the gray of the granite and the silver of the mica and the yellow and white of the broom, and then, in the evening, the glow of lights from the tent-houses across the way, shining through the cracks, and the familiar voices, after all these days and weeks of darkness and silence. How only an hour ago a neighbor thought to have vanished had turned up, and he and the speaker had fallen into each other’s arms and even hoisted each other into the air, and how the absent one had not only been in the best of moods but had also brought his neighbor a gift, along with gifts for his own wife and children, and not some bauble, either, no, a most valuable and beautiful gift, for him, the neighbor, the speaker.

  No wonder, the reporter wrote, that in a social order like Pedrada’s, restricted in this way to glorification of neighborliness and good repute—and this was the most worrisome feature of all—a kind of smugness had taken hold among the settlers there that did not pertain to neighbors and those telling stories about each other but increasingly became a menace, a danger to areas outside the narrow confines of the region, a true public menace.