by Peter Handke
The glowing sky reflected in what looked like subterranean boats not yet completely surfaced and shot through with alabaster-white veins of quartz. Crossing these gentle, stadium-size rocky mounds as if one were all dressed up, even if one had not put on anything special for the journey (or had one?).
And nevertheless closest to the blue of the sky above the ridge, either lightning blue or in the next moment almost outer-space black, whenever one took in the sky not nakedly and directly but glimpsed through a shrub or a tree—so now and then there still was a tree, if only a dwarf one—a blue, merely as background. Merely?
Every long story, she later told the author, has a certain color, a predominant color. And the color she wanted for their book—just as its sound should be the steps of a solitary person walking through the granite sand of the otherwise silent, still Sierra—was that sky-blue shining intermittently through the mountain brush. It was the blue found in the background of medieval stained-glass windows, with the twigs, branches, evergreen leaves, needles, berries (juniper berries or rowanberries, for instance), fruit capsules (rose hips, for instance), and pods (of broom) as the figures against this background. Smoke-colored sky-blue. For the smoke color lent objects their sharpest contours.
No, when the blue glowed and shimmered through the slits, gaps, and holes in the Sierra vegetation, filling the smallest openings and being simply blue and still, it resembled the blue of work clothes hung out to dry as far as the eye could see. She knew that blue from her ancestral village, and not only from there: the blue of her neighbors’ work pants and jackets, seen through the foliage of bushes and fruit trees. And upon seeing that blue one thought simultaneously of “work” and “festivity.” The blue behind the leaves presented the image of work clothes that could also serve as party clothes, just as they were, without having to be altered in any fashion. It was the blue of patches, but also the blue of brides’ trains and scarves and flags—flags with this background-blue as their only color. It looked like cloth, as no other blue and no other color did; it had nothing heavenly or ethereal about it, but rather hung, stood, rested, waited for one in back there as a material, as something material.
Despite its being winter, some thickets of broom emitted a summery vanilla scent as one slipped through them. When one had painfully forced one’s way between two boulders, one’s hands had a singed smell, as after rubbing flints together. When we bit into the withered and blackened rowanberries, which hung in bunches from bare trees that were hardly taller than we were, seemingly frozen and long since dried out, our mouths, parched from the climb, were filled with the taste of the fresh berries and even their juice, both bitter as can be, but how refreshing! and promptly lengthening our stride—the rowanberries’ taste so evocative of midsummer that we saw before us the unique light red, the rowanberry red, of newly ripened bunches, in a way that we had never encountered during an actual summer, different from a mere daydream red.
Involuntarily we stuffed our pockets with the surprisingly weighty—but not “heavy”—clumps of berries. We would need them later, especially on the descent into the southern lowland, where, winter or not, we would feel hotter and hotter; as if for a weeklong expedition—one never knew—at the little island of trees amid the sea of cliffs and snow, we supplemented our provisions (the author suggested using the word “provender” occasionally, even if this term was no longer in use in his far-off linguistic homeland).
And now as we plucked more and more bunches of fruit, with the practiced motions of those who had been fruit thieves from childhood on, and finally stood on tiptoe to reach the clusters (yes, more “clusters” than “berries”), we finally understood why the common name for these berries was “bird berries”: for concealed behind them, completely hidden from view, perched the small birds so rare in the Sierra—mountain titmice, wrens, robins—behind the clusters but also in them, inconspicuously and silently pecking at them—and when you stood on tiptoe and reached for the berries, they whooshed out of the little rowan tree, not all at once, but each one just as its berries were about to be picked, each of them scolding and shrieking as the rightful owner of the bird-berry bunch, robbed by you of its due.
As the story went, there was once a time when the hunters of the Sierra, not those hunters whose story remains to be told here, even planted rowan trees hither and yon in the mountain wilderness, in order to lure the small birds that were prized as delicacies, and at any rate the rowan trees that often stand alone, as if artificially planted, in the Sierra de Gredos have a second name, along with “bird berry” also “hunter ash.” Bitter-as-can-be berries or clusters? Yes, bitter as can be. Not bitter as gall.
But as other fruits first tasted sweet and only later manifested their bitterness, deep within, a bitterness that caused the person eating them to spit them out suddenly, a bitterness that not only turned his stomach but “shook him up” (a village expression?), the rowanberries by contrast revealed to the palate, after the initial off-putting bitterness, a taste that was more than mere “sweetness”: an inwardness (did that exist, an “inward taste”?) all the more inward because the initial bitterness remained present in it. Ah, ow, oh—only no “ugh!”—the rowanberries in the rocky clefts of the Sierra de Gredos. (Was it appropriate for her, the heroine, to stand on tiptoe? Yes.)
26
During one period—which one, again, hardly matters for the current story—she had viewed possessions and property as a kind of “accomplishment” (though different from the accomplishment of “having a child,” in which she continued to believe, now even unwaveringly). And at the end of that period? She was no longer so sure.
And now, while crossing the Sierra? Was she happy to be as far as possible from her so-called possessions; to get through the day without ever thinking about or looking at things the way a property-owner would—in other words, to be rid of something that over time, rather than cushioning or liberating a person, tended to make one petty and rigid, which plagued and preoccupied one (and there was nothing positive in being thus “occupied”)?
What: Was she, a banker and economist, which she continued to be, in her apparently traditional fashion, an enemy of property?
Yes: at least as far as her personal existence was concerned. And besides, she saw here, too, a problem that was beautiful = worth describing, but not a contradiction. Even a few top people at the World and Universal Bank—before her journey, one could easily have pictured her as one of them—had recently come out in opposition to the position on property espoused by this super-powerful institution, which merely pretended to want to help the have-nots of the world and in reality was out to enhance its own power and prestige, and had left their posts with that institution to do something altogether different—something in opposition. And perhaps these people, one at a time, were also making their way through a similar moonlike region, devoid of human beings, relieved to be released for the time being from their eternal preoccupation with power and possessions, perhaps even contemplating an entirely new paradigm?
No, owning property could be an accomplishment for a while, but it was not one’s mission in life—which it seemed to have become in the current era. Money and possessions had become the be-all and end-all. The money-changers in the temple? No, the temple of money-changers—and it was the one temple that still counted. In the face of the silence, brightness, and sanctified aura of the money temple, everything else could not help degenerating into dark, agitatedly flailing, recidivist raging. But to her, and precisely to her, the formerly fruitful and liberating notion of property seemed exhausted once and for all, yes, a complete failure. Property no longer represented an ideal.
And because, as she made her way through the Sierra, no “property” crossed her path and disrupted her rhythm, she became, and was, so free that she could do the smallest thing, or, with reference to others, the majority, could “undertake” them. At least this conception accompanied her, and for a stretch her “I” or “one” became a “we” and a “you.”
We laced our boots. We would bring this rock crystal back for you, and this sheet of mica for you, and this snakeskin for you.
Yes, just as she was making the journey for herself, she was undertaking it for others, and in the rhythm of her stride she felt constantly accompanied by others. It was crucial to stay away from property, as far as possible. We have been property owners long enough. And there was very little that got in the way of observing and perceiving—of seeing the big picture—as much as property ownership. And if we lost the ability to observe, we ceased to be worthy of observation, of being kept in the picture.
And at the same time she remained aware that one false step, one stumble, not even a broken foot, merely a sprain, would be enough to put an end to this cocky “we.” One momentary slip, and the veil of universality, the epic sweep, would be ripped off our big picture of the world, and all such words as “we” and “you” and “one” would be blown away, and only the teeny-tiny “I,” more solipsistic still than the property owners’ “I,” would be left, more wretched, ridiculous, and, in her eyes, now “not worth describing.”
And even more powerful than her constant awareness of the external danger of falling, which was mechanical and merely threatened her body and could also be anticipated and to some extent forestalled, another awareness was at work inside her, one that had pursued her since her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, when she was halfway to the top and suddenly found herself without her companion, the father of her child, which she could feel, ready to be born, in her protruding belly; under her heart.
Just as then, when she had stood alone with the fetus in the blazing granite-cliff sun, there would again erupt from deep within her something that would turn everything upside down, uncontrollably: labor pains, which would have nothing to do with giving birth, bringing something into the world, and which, also, instead of just hurting, produced sheer, revolting horror—turning not only herself but the entire exterior world upside down, so that again she would be unable to distinguish her head from her feet, but also north from south, earth from sky, horizontal from vertical, mountain from plain, up from down, large from small, body from surfaces, eagles from lizards, ants from ibexes, cliffs from houses, rockslides from metropolises—all hopelessly mixed up before her eyes. Hopelessly? Hopelessly.
Yes, infinitely more to be feared than a false step was the repetition of that tumbling and stumbling of her insides, casting her, and with her the world and everything in it, into a chaotic state in which the cosmos (which meant “ornament” and “order,” did it not?) seemed utterly insane and the entire creation fell out of joint—and far outstripped the so-called primal chaos in its frantic confusion.
“To get a grip on things,” she went on, “I sank my teeth into my arm, and as I did so felt my arm growing teeth and biting me back in the face … The tops of the cliffs, although they were standing still, began to tip in all directions. The kite circling in the distance grazed me with its beak. The shoe I had kicked off became a person in his death throes, his mouth gaping wide. A circle of dead tree trunks bent over to become a herd of elephants, about to stampede over me and the child in my belly. I jumped backward at the sight of a cloud. I leaned over to pick some blackberries that were hanging high above my head. When a butterfly approached, I jerked my head to the side as if it were a mountain vulture. Like someone cutting her own hair in front of a mirror—no, not like that—I reached to the left for something on the right, in front of me for something at my back, and vice versa, and vice versa again. And finally, in a panic, I even looked for the doorbell in a rock wall …” For once she did not interrupt her story in midstream, but was all afire (the author: “an expression still in use?”) to go on and on, describing the episode.
So was the narrow, rigid gaze of the property owner therefore preferable to the threat of such dire confusion? The halfway-safe “What’s mine is mine”?
“It is true,” she then told the author in his village in La Mancha: “Even far from my earthly possessions, on my way to you, I allowed myself to be influenced, incidentally and not even all that reluctantly, by one of my belongings, as if that could keep me from being thrown off course. Yes, among other things, while crossing the Sierra this time I was guided by the thought that in a bush or somewhere I would come upon a certain object I had lost on another crossing, nothing special, nothing valuable, some small thing, insignificant in itself, but linked with a memory. I am repeating myself? As I should. You should repeat it as well, author of mine.”—The author: “A scarf? A glove? A pocketknife?”—She: “A scarf. I was constantly on the lookout for the black scarf I lost maybe ten years ago, one summer, in the Sierra.”
The author: “So that means a yes, within limits, to owning such personal items? But not real estate, not house and land? When it comes to the latter, your story should say the exact opposite of your immortal predecessor’s, in which house and patience are named in one breath: ‘He abandoned his house and his patience.’ So instead: ‘She abandoned the house and impatience’; ‘She abandoned the house and intolerance’; ‘She set out for distant parts and patience’; ‘She set out for foreign parts and tolerance’?”—She: “Yes, something along those lines.”
Despite all the measures and precautions taken, the moment nonetheless came when up again turned into down, houses became cliffs, cliffs became lodgings, and chaos took hold.
Except that this soon lost its power to terrify. For the first time now it was right and proper. It started—so the story goes—with her pausing on one of the outer shelves of the main Sierra ridge that were staggered in an even rhythm all the way to the horizon and looking back into the high valley of the río Tormes and its headwaters, where she had begun her ascent that morning.
She saw Pedrada lying below, the stone-thrower village. But was this still her Pedrada? Weren’t the tents she recalled actually a cluster of those conical and pyramid-shaped haystacks typical of the Sierra de Gredos, far from any settlement, fenced off from the mountain wilderness by stone walls, which surrounded the stacks, always in a circle? And these hay cones, precisely in the middle of the otherwise empty stone enclosures—no cattle or sheep in sight—looked as if they had long since been abandoned there, blackened with age, stacked perhaps years, if not decades, earlier, the hay unusable, the tarpaulins covering them tattered to shreds.
Her, and our, Pedrada no longer existed; the stone buildings were blocks of granite heaved out of the ground; “Pedrada” a mere name, with no village to go with it, similar to the way in which, on the route ahead of her, the Puerto de Candeleda had long since ceased to be a pass or a crossing and merely bore the name, with not even the suggestion of a notch there at the top of the ridge.
And she did not see that phantasmagorical Pedrada at her feet, far below; rather the tent-shaped haystacks and the boulders, strewn about as if by an explosion, appeared as if high above her; although she had been climbing for all those hours, they now seemed to be above eye level—just as in the game German children call “Heaven and Hell” the players see themselves rolling along the ground through an undulating landscape bisected by furrows, down into one furrow and ditch, then up, then down again, and up again, until in the end below becomes above, heaven above becomes hell below, and vice versa again.
But unlike what had happened during her first time in the Sierra, this time one experienced such reversals as part of a game involving the terrain or region, the result of the particular sequence and rhythm in which one experienced this mountainous area as one walked, climbed, descended, and ascended again, and this time the constant transformation of earth-low into sky-high did not produce dread (yes, dread, horror) but contentment, not unlike that of children tumbling and rolling over hummocks—a sense of lightheartedness and levity at finding that for once “heaven” was “hell” and “hell” was now “heaven.”
And likewise, when we turned toward our destination, the crest, we saw it, along with the still merely imaginary Candeleda Pass, not at the level of our brow o
r crown, but sunken, hardly reaching our beltline, as if the shelf where we had paused were already the main ridge up above.
And here between our feet and the crest of the Sierra (hardly a stone’s throw and birds’ or electric pylons’ swoop away?), over there where the mountain range actually should have presented a landscape of peaks, reaching for outer space: a gigantic hollow, hemmed in to the west and the east, toward sunrise and sunset, by the steep cliffs of the “summit plain,” which formed a fragmentary half-circle around the hollow; hollow? more like an area of collapse or a depression, and all this up sky-high, with the bottom of this depression having the appearance of a mammoth arena.
And although it was not her first time here, she did not recognize this arena. The dark spot at the bottom was a forest, if only a small one, and it had not been there earlier. But the pool at the bottom of the depression—or was it a lake, if only a very small one?—was not new to her; it was the Laguna Grande de Gredos, a lake! Except that its water was not even frozen, and had clouds drifting over it, of frost? smoke? haze?
Familiar to her from before were, likewise, the tumbled boulders, both on the floor of the arena and—even more helter-skelter, fractured, and varied—on the slopes or “tiers” of the natural amphitheater, in which ten times ten theaters the size of the already enormous one at Epidauros would have fit easily. She knew that the entire hell-deep depression there had once been filled to the rim with glacial ice, and that it was the glacier that had left the boulders, towers, and fragments all higgledy-piggledy, leaning against each other, crashed on top of each other, some seemingly standing on their heads (or on their hands, or on only one hand)? Yes, in bygone times, chaos had reigned clear across the Sierra arena, hour after hour, day after day, and for thousands of years, an incessant crashing, smashing, splitting, pounding, with sparks flying. But then, once the ice had melted and was no longer eternal, the chaos had died down. Now it was recalled only on maps, in mountaineering books, in the guide to the “Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”: “El caos de Hondoneda” (or “Hondareda”), the Chaos of Hondoneda (hondo, deep); “chaos” was the name used the world over for all the areas formerly chewed up by the glacier—nothing quieter than a “chaos” like this, and even the rock formations that seemed to be resting on only one hand were stable for the duration (the duration?).
