Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  And once more she agreed with the reporter. She even felt a kind of admiration for his observation regarding this most peculiar clumsiness. Except that she, the fellow survivor and sister in clumsiness, again also saw something that transcended this phenomenon. Where the reporter, with the perspective of a complete outsider, saw nothing funny in the sudden tumbles, collisions, and heaps of broken glass, nothing but further proof of the local life-lie, she, the eyewitness and kin to these people, first felt moved to laugh, and “after that” to cry.

  Her own manifestations of clumsiness could never have brought tears to her eyes, unlike those of her people here, often heartrending reversals of the “last-minute saves” familiar from old-time films: falls just before a perfect ending or before a brilliant freestyle dismount. Was it because she saw in the others’ vicissitudes the course her own life was taking? “No.” Because she saw the world this way? “No. Actually, the truth is,” she told the author later in his village in La Mancha, “that I realized, upon seeing these repeated, apparently axiomatic, misfortunes that mirrored my own (often just minor ones, which, however, because they thwarted people on the verge of success, took on the dimensions of major accidents), that they for their part and I for mine, we survivors, had probably not survived that successfully after all.

  “A part of us, of me and of these people, still lay knocked to the ground, close to death, in a hapless heap. And the other part of us, dancing its dance of survival on the lightest of feet, was always in danger, magnetically drawn by the overwhelming gravity of this heap, of stumbling off course and tumbling toward it.

  “On the one hand, my people and I were the quintessential survivors: live wires, full of spark and spunk—and, on the other hand, since the moment of that great fall, survivors merely in appearance, dashed to the ground dying, dying.”

  Yet in her view there was something positive after all in this precarious survival: of all the senses, the sense of taste had become the most acutely developed. True, the other senses seemed to have been refined as well. But there the result tended to be more in the nature of intensifica-tions, excesses, even deviations and aberrations.

  The mistaken, if not panic-filled, sense of hearing has already been mentioned. Seeing, especially seeing that involved things beyond the safe thresholds of the new settlement, took place too much out of the corners of the eyes, and thus inanimate objects seemed to come alive, motionless things seemed to move, and so on. And their apparent motion always signified misfortune or calamity to the new settlers. Someone, a person in one’s care, a child, was hurtling off a steep cliff. Or a mortal enemy seemed to come tearing at one at full speed (yet it was merely one of the frequent sudden wind gusts whipping a solitary broom bush).

  Similarly subject to mistaken perception was the survivors’ sense of smell. There was not a single lovely scent—and what scents one could sniff in the high Sierra, where even the pure air had a delicious smell to it—that could not suddenly acquire the reek of decay.

  The sense of touch, or skin sense, however, turned out to be atrophied among the Hondareda population, hardly present anymore, at least among the “squad” (her term) or the “band” (his) of original settlers down there; and that was hardly a function (here the two outsiders were again in agreement) of the more advanced age of all of them.

  Nonetheless, the reporter then promptly called into question the comment made by his interlocutor, the strange yet familiar adventurer, to the effect that these people’s fingertips had grown numb and dulled this way in the hour of their near death. “How do you know that?”—She: “I know it from experience.”—“Knowledge from experience does not count in our case.”—She: “‘He (or she) knew from experience’: you find that in the most ancient books, in all the early written languages, and from the beginning this formula has always been valid.”

  For him, however, such knowledge had not a whisper of probative value. A fact, demonstrated with reproducible data, researched by a representative number of “contemporary survivors,” was their “positively superb” sense of taste. No normal person could taste food and drink as such survivors could, foretasting and aftertasting, salivating, letting them melt on the tongue, rolling them between the lips and the palate, and, as if without swallowing, without any detour by way of digestion and circulation, solely by virtue of a consummate tasting that went on and on, letting them flash from the eye, transformed into living atoms, letting them spark from the ears, puff from the nostrils, glow from every pore of the skin, but primarily from the cheeks, foreheads, and, most especially, the temples.

  On the other hand, what was supposed to be positive about this? It was no secret, after all, that the Hondarederos, no matter how shabby and stranded they appeared, were certainly not poverty-stricken. Even if they had not exactly accumulated fortunes in their previous lives, they had by no means been without means (pun), something they perhaps had even more in common than survival.

  And although here in the Sierra depression they were not seen with money, that did not mean that they had renounced property and possessions: in the valleys beyond the mountain crests, and beyond those all the way to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and likewise across the oceans, these self-appointed repeaters of a vita nuova enjoyed unlimited credit, each and every one of them. World champions in tasting, true—thanks to the trinity of survival, the mountain air, and, above all, a life of luxury. After all, hadn’t these folks, after they had become has-beens everywhere else, made their way here more to indulge themselves in peace in good eating and drinking—see the oyster shells scattered about?

  As the two of them conversed in this fashion, standing on the porcelain-smooth granite outcropping in the remote area just below the Puerto de Candeleda, she, in her time among the new settlers of the Sierra, had already been invited several times to dinner—in each case, only the host and she at the table, each meal accompanied by a monologue spoken by the host and chef—and now she offered more or less the following reply to the observer:

  First of all—she demanded of the author that he reproduce her part of the conversation with the observer in indirect discourse—the oyster shells were not left over from the inhabitants’ cooking but had been left there by transcontinental drifters, or, as they called themselves, “novo-nomads” (a temporary phenomenon long since passé) when they had visited the glacial basin that had become a greening, grain-yellow, and water-blue valley and thus an attraction: an oyster picnic in the mountains had been as much in vogue among them as a chamois-sausage afternoon snack in their desert bivouac and penguin-in-pastry-shell on a trans-Antarctic excursion train.

  And furthermore, her people did allow themselves the occasional luxury, but none that consisted of anything extra, or of imported ingredients. Every luxury came from substances extracted from the most hidden and, at the same time, magically fruitful—a natural magic, following the laws of nature—crevices and deposits in the area. These were the usual products and plants from such altitudes, as scarce and scanty as anywhere, items like juniper berries, bilberries, rowanberries, rose hips, acorns, Sierra olives, and so forth. Except that, because of the warming climate, the sun heated the rocks in such a way that, in all these fruits, in their classic miniature mountain forms, their pure essence was concentrated.

  So there were no apples or grapes of the size found in the Garden of Eden or the Land of Canaan; but the few one could detect with the naked eye—for that reason alone they constituted a luxury, no, a treasure—were, whether added as garnish to ordinary meals or eaten separately, a whole meal in themselves, a delicacy, something for which the word delicatesse would be appropriate for once.

  Altogether, the Hondareda depression was in reality less disadvantaged and inimical to life than one would have concluded from the name, and not only from first appearances. All the rounded granite boulders that had emerged from the thawing ice, hundreds and thousands of them, scattered hither and yon across the valley and up to the summit plain, polished to a high sheen, veined wi
th sparkling white bands of quartz, reflecting each other many times over, especially now in the cold season, with the sun at an oblique angle all day, represented a system of natural solar collectors, by no means weak, and radiating heat even at night, which were used by the settlers—in the village and throughout the village, even the clumsiest and most awkward of them having become in the twinkling of an eye technical experts and engineers—to heat their dwelling niches, carved out of the cliffs, as well as their patchlike plantations, easily mistaken for rockslides, and the occasional greenhouses (mistaken by the observer for piles of debris, with half-broken panes of glass, sheets of corrugated tin, cardboard, and splintered window frames, beneath which, in his eyes, poisonous green, sulphur-yellow, and moldy gray weeds flourished).

  To that extent her people, the handful there in the Pleasant Plantation, were indeed creatures of luxury, hiding, whether intentionally or not, under the cloak of being cast adrift in this region and wretchedly eking out an existence; that side of their being, too, which the reporter accurately characterized as a “reversion to hunting and gathering,” was part of the luxury, if only because of the rarity and—not only for that reason—deliciousness of the wild animals they bagged.

  Which brought her back to the Hondarederos’ sense of taste, far surpassing all the other senses. Not once had a meal to which she had been bidden borne the slightest resemblance to gluttony or carousing. Rather, these few meals, rare in every sense, had consisted of tasting, sampling, nibbling; yet they had been as filling and thirst-quenching as any food and drink could be. In the same way that the new settlers had of their own accord become technicians, repairmen, and inventors, without training or study, simply in response to local conditions, so, too, taking the fruits of the area and ennobling them, they had, without lessons or planning, transformed themselves into culinary artists.

  And these chefs consumed what they themselves had prepared with an enthusiasm experienced hardly anywhere else. They—and the guest in their company—inhaled their dishes. If there had been no devouring, even in the presence of intense hunger, it had nothing to do with “good manners”: devouring the items, yes, “items,” had been absolutely out of the question.

  In their sense of taste, all feeling for being alive and surviving had been concentrated. And the other senses, those affected by their near deaths, had become concentrated (“No, gathered,” she to the author) in such tasting. Seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting, or, to put it differently, all sensitivities, had been drawn into these meals and had either regained their rhythm or, in the sense of touch, their function.

  This manner of eating had helped heal and unify the senses, and further more had never become routine.—“Unified senses, sensuousness?” —That, too; but the unified senses had had an even stronger effect on the thinking of the immigrants of Hondareda—whose nickname among them had been La Mojada Honda (The Deep Mountain Pasture, The Deep Enclosure); not so much on their abstract thinking as on the way they considered and contemplated a specific thing or problem.

  Every mealtime in the village had also been a time of contemplation—not an intensified but rather a heightened and elevated contemplation—where external and internal reflection had gone hand in hand, accompanied by a cheerfulness otherwise rare in those parts; the result being a likewise uncommon loquacity, a speaking in tongues very different from ordinary table conversation, more like the conversations of the mute with themselves, going in circles; thus also close to exuberance and pure, hearty nonsense—as was generally the case when, after spending time in a death zone, people regained the air of life, and with it, language.

  The eating and drinking had had an effect on those confused folk and their jumbled senses, thoughts, and words, an effect similar to that which a certain kind of reading had on other survivors, a reading that was neither skimming nor poking around nor devouring, but a reflective tracing, in places also spelling out and deciphering, and if ultimately it was a form of consuming after all, it was a kind of inhaling, a breathing in (and out). Such meals represented time saved in two ways, much as reading did, and also rhythmic (recreational) walking.

  Like those survivor-readers glancing into a book, the survivor-eaters there had been impelled by tasting to look up and raise their heads for contemplation, some for release from themselves, some for relaxation, some for excitement, and finally some for the pleasure of communicating and sharing—as among the previously mentioned readers out of the desire to read aloud or even to act on something they had long ago resolved to do, an action postponed almost past the time for it—which only now, with reading, with tasting, became possible and accessible—even if such an action, in the presence of food, just as in the presence of books, should express itself merely in a seemingly meaningless hug given to a random stranger.

  29

  The reporter presumably replied to her as follows: “The Deep Enclosure? The Pleasant Plantation? We outside observers have another name for the basin of Hondareda: The Dark Clearing. And this is no paradox or play on words now; I do not want you to have sawn off my ponytail in vain. The term ‘Dark Clearing’ actually stems from an observation shared by all who were dispatched here: as a result of the belt of trees planted around the bottom of the basin or arena, the area it encircles has taken on the character of a classic clearing, a clarière, a tschistina, a claro—the expressions in all languages have to do with brightness. But in Hondareda, darkness mixes in with the brightness that remains trapped in the light, smooth rocks and rock dwellings, evident each time one looks, a gloom specific to the place. Contrary to the assertion that they live in a clearing, darkness prevails there. The interior of the surrounding dense conifer forests is an opaque black. And this black does not remain confined to the forest. It is constantly reaching for the open area. True: the mountain sun, together with its reflection in the glacial lake and its more colorful, varied, warm reflection in the indeed wondrously smooth granite hilltops—you see, I am not merely an observer!—provides a heightened light to the circle of the settlement, light such as I have never encountered in any other clearing in the world.

  “This much is also true: when one sets foot in this space for the first time, one involuntarily says to oneself: How beautiful this is. What beauty. Where am I? One does not want to leave. One? I. Something has begun to happen. Something is beginning to happen. Something will begin to happen. I will begin to do something. My thinking will change—will become larger, wider—and correspondingly brighter. Warmhearted. Moved by love and intent on love.

  “And on all subsequent occasions as well, when, after the long climb from the Tormes valley below and the descent to the bottom of the basin, I had the clearing before me, in the first tenth of a second something surged up in me—something like a moment of being airborne (which, now that we come here by helicopter rather than on foot, no longer happens—peace at last, thanks to objectivity).

  “But even that first time, upon my stepping into the clearing, after five to eight paces toward its center, it became obvious that the special light there is an illusion. It is only a feeling. It does not count. What does count, and what in fact prevails, is the pitch blackness that confronts one in the middle of this allegedly new land, as it glows in the sun and all the colors of midday, the blackness emanating from the surrounding stand of trees, which has the character of a jungle-like primeval forest, although it was planted only a short while ago. The blackness, instead of perhaps softening the brightness, relativizing it, or, if you will, grounding it, cancels out the promise or the prophecy that seems initially to radiate from the local light, and makes my feeling null and void, and properly so. Dark Clearing.

  “And as befits this kind of a dark clearing, those who have immigrated there, the objects of my observation, exist and conduct themselves according to its standards, under the spell of its darkness. In settling there they have certainly not struck out to find the light and the air of a different era, but are lying in wait, which is what the hunters and gatherers did i
n dark prehistoric times, and gloomily—more gloomy and numb than prehistoric people can possibly have been—otherwise they would hardly have evolved.

  “I am speaking in paradoxes? This tribe of bumblers lives them. These folks produce nothing, not even contradictions, which would be a kind of productivity: they cling to the unproductive dream of an upside-down world. Even in their shadowy hunter-gatherer ways the signs have been reversed: gathering—listen to this!—is considered, and not only officially, by my dear Hondareda idiots, to be an activity that brutalizes the individual as well as the group and carries with it the danger of spiritual decadence, while hunting, on the other hand, is seen as an opportunity for achieving greater humanity.

  “It, yes, hunting, first of all, hones one’s attention, and in a fundamentally different way from gathering: in contrast to the latter, hunting does not narrow one’s field of vision but rather widens it, literally to infinity. According to them, hunting, tracking, and the like involves the entire body, increases circumspection, makes one aware of the terrain—in distinction to the gatherer’s mere knowledge of the best places to find things—and in particular develops in those who practice it endless patience.

  “But gathering threatens to cripple the body and the soul. It even interferes with and distorts the erect posture. And altogether, collecting is the province of impure ulterior motives and top-heaviness, the province of envy, greed, avarice, and other cardinal sins. More than hunting, gathering can degenerate into hostility, not so much the activity itself as the motives and sidelong looks associated with it. Gathering makes people small, in particular by shrinking all the others with and around the gatherer, not only because of his gaze, which is constantly focused on the ground, on crevices, on the underbrush, instead of scanning the sky or staying at normal eye level, and eventually makes them disappear and/or magnifies them into seeking-and-gathering rivals.