Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  “And, he says, what he misses more and more painfully in the world, and in this world, is seeing. And regaining the ability to see is what motivates him up here, on the ‘Isthmus of the Transitional Period’—such an appropriate term—in the Pleasant Plantation or the Deep Enclosure, the Mojada Honda, and not for the sake of one image or another, no, simply for the sake of seeing, conflict-resolving, existence-justifying, ‘world-anchoring,’ dignifying, renewing, connecting, seeing. As Goethe says, ‘Born to look, appointed to see … thus the world is pleasing to me,’ thus the world is created for me, thus the world coalesces for me, or something like that.

  “And accordingly the primary activity of each individual and solitary person here, independent of his neighbor and next-door property owner, is seeing, on the strips or isthmuses, wherever in their view there is something to see, no matter what. Daybreak and seeing. Deep night and more seeing, for instance of the trees’ shadows on the rock faces (in the image-free strips or passages). ‘To see and let appear’—the settlement’s motto, similar to ‘Dream and work.’ Or is it a form of working? Or of leisure? Impossible to tell the difference.

  “What do you think? Why do you say nothing? This is what the returnees believe at any rate, as always in complete unanimity, without prior consultation with one another: images are certainly essential; without them no transmission of the world and no sense of life. But in the previous century in particular, images were overexploited as never before. As a result, the world of images has dried up—has, without exception, become blind, mute, and stale—incapable of being refreshed by any science. And thus, in this transitional period, all that is possible is seeing—in which, by the way, all science is included, and out of which science must develop, one step at a time. The Hondareda idiots consider themselves scientists!

  “And the childish things on which they spend their time in their Dark Clearing are, for them—even if they use entirely different terms, as for almost everything, old-fashioned and obsolete ones—‘sight-enhancing measures.’ That includes not only their posing as hunters, their acting as though they were stalking, taking aim, and so on: time and again one sees them walking backward, more often than forward; that kind of thing, they assert, enhances seeing as much as their constant squatting, close to the ground (whereas standing on tiptoes is prohibited—their standard dictum: ‘Standing on tiptoes is no standing’).

  “When they unexpectedly whirl like dervishes, one person in the background turning to the east, then, without any connection to him, another in back to the west, it is of course no dance, either; the people of the Pedrada-Hondareda region have neither games nor dances, and that includes the young ones—but rather, well, you already know this, or do you?—an exercise in seeing!

  “Instead of putting things where they belong or filing them away like adults, these people of the depression are also constantly tossing things into place, and from as far away as possible, and, furthermore, not straightaway and forthwith—now I am using such obsolete expressions myself—but always in an arc, and one that is as high as possible, and to what end? You know this. To facilitate seeing, seeing, nothing but seeing.

  “If only such exercises, measures, and exertions led to something: to moldability (ah, another word from horse-and-buggy days); to mobility; to awareness of another person—I don’t necessarily mean of me—to neighborliness, or at least a hint of everyday togetherness. But as I have observed for one year, three days, and five to nine hours, each of these Hondareda desperados is holed up, stiff as a board, deep inside his hovel, shack, and barbed-wire enclosure, immobile and immovable, having taken leave for good of the present.

  “While in the meantime we have lit up even the North and South Pole, as well as the peak of Everest and the Aconcagua, only the Hondareda region persists in its self-imposed darkness. The only semblance of a joint activity I have been able to observe in my subjects here is that whenever one of them thinks he has spotted something for which he has long been searching, or something precious, or simply something beautiful—precisely in their ugliness they are obsessed with beauty, or, as they express it, with the ‘uncommonly beautiful’—but then realizes that he was mistaken—as he was every other time, by the way—that he was thoroughly mistaken and rashly pounced on what he mistook for a treasure or something uncommonly beautiful, but which turned out to be worthless, ordinary, or nothing at all, the person experiencing such a disappointment, and that is what can be astonishing, at the moment when he realizes he was deluded, turns out to be not bitter in the slightest, but rather, without any premeditation, cheerfully disappointed. Disappointment fills the person in question, no matter who in this glacial basin, with cheerfulness.

  “And in this state of cheerful disappointment, and only in this state, the individual at the same time always gains the ability to turn to the others in the settlement. At the moment when he is fixated on the deceptive object there, in a rock crevice, the crook of a tree, a fissure in the ground, he calls, whistles, and drums together the entire core population of the Dark Clearing. And the others promptly cluster around him. And he tells them what value, or rarity, or uncommon beauty he allowed himself to project onto this thing or stuff or trifle or garbage or piece of junk.

  “And as they stand there with him and inspect the spot or the mess or the nothing-at-all from every side, they share his disillusionment, but likewise, by virtue of the enduring effect of imagination, his cheerfulness. How they all perk up. And these are the only occasions up to now on which I have heard them laugh. Otherwise they cannot laugh, you see, either at others or at themselves—at anything at all. To be sure, disappointments like this and the resulting shared amusement are everyday occurrences down there.

  “And the contemplation of mistakes and disappointments, and of absent treasures or treasures they missed again, or other objects of longing, represents for them the acme of seeing, constitutes their way of celebrating, their kind of celebration. These poor, aloof Hondarederitos—have you noticed that I even have a term of endearment for this tribe of new savages! Their dangerous solipsism: What unspeakable war, unlike any that ever took place, are they hatching?—for there is no doubt that they are on a war footing with people like us. Why will not a single one of them look at me? And why will not a single one of them speak a word to me?

  “Just as you, foreign lady, have not looked me in the eye once in all this time. Why not? Not for a single micromillisecond during the year or decade of my observing and recording up here in the high Sierra have human eyes looked at me. And what about your fellow observers, you ask. (Why do you not ask?) Not a word about them. Except this: that they are not intentionally mean nor behave as if they were—their mere presence and hanging around is mischief enough. I say that? Yes, I do. In the course of time, I have even tried to meet the eyes of the animals here, the ibex, the Capra hispanica, the snakes, the bulls, the vultures, the dragonflies on the laguna, the wagtails—by the way, the only time I was eyed affectionately, it was by the latter, from a broom bush, from a boulder in a glacial brook.

  “In the Pleasant Plantation not one pair of human eyes has ever met mine. Here in the Deep Enclosure not a brown or blue or green or gray or any other color of eye has ever taken me in. Not a single person sees me. On the other hand, I am not kindly ignored by anyone, except perhaps by my co-observers.

  “I cannot take a single step unobserved. But what a manner of being observed. Yes, it is different from being observed reproachfully. Yet there is no doubt that these gazes are meant to punish me, if any ever were. No, these gazes are not meant to kill. Instead they declare me dead. In their eyes, I, their observer and reporter, have already been dead for a long time. The way their gaze scans me, they doubtless see a cadaver in their field of vision, or a living corpse—which does not count in this field, however—what does count there? you ask; what counts in their field of vision: light, wind, gaps, sand, also flies, spiders, and Sierra beetles. In contrast to the apathy and fatigue they exhibit toward me, what thei
r eyes manifest at the mere glimpse of a wild boar’s droppings or a snowflake can be described as a glow.

  “Everywhere in today’s world, the borders have long since been eliminated. This regressive crew, however, has reintroduced all the old barriers in this crisis-ridden region. Not only against those of us coming from the outside, but also among themselves—another result of the loss of images: they have created the most dense network imaginable of not only old and ancient boundary lines but also previously unthought-of, inconceivable ones: actual ones in the form of thresholds, barriers, and beams, and likewise imaginary ones, which are often even more effective.

  “Women, and men as well, go around shrouded and veiled, or do you think I merely have that impression? That it looks that way to me—but doesn’t that say something, too? Not only their houses are barred, off limits to people like us, as well as to their nearest neighbor, and besides completely out of sight; also around his garden—for there is no cramped cave and hut that lacks a large garden—every one of the resettlers has erected a wall made of clay, tarpaper, tin, manure, and the like, unless the beds and fruit trees are already shielded from prying eyes by the enormous boulders broken off from the cliffs or moved there. This wall is higher than any I have seen around a garden anywhere, as high as a prison wall.

  “Even the graves are strictly separated from one another—during my time here, nine to thirteen of them have already been dug or hewn out of the granite: there is no such thing as community cemeteries; rather each planter unit or monad has its own grave, each clearly isolated from the other, miles away, somewhere way out in the mountain wastes.

  “The living observe an equally strict distance: when two or three of them happened to come together, I hardly ever saw one of them as close as arm’s length or closer to his fellow resident, and it is even more frowned upon here to follow close behind someone, on his heels; and whereas, in a crowd, we contemporaries romp along freely next to each other, having often just eliminated the last barriers, in this desolate spot all it takes is for a second person to appear in a deserted area for me to feel I have no room to breathe!

  “Borders upon borders here, one more grotesque than the next. And most grotesque of all is perhaps the fact that they communicate with each other primarily in writing, that is to say, in letters—orally or over the telephone only in the most extreme emergencies—otherwise that is frowned upon: if a person so much as addresses another person coming toward him, out of the blue, the others go out of their way to avoid him, and he is left standing there alone. Nothing happens here that does not involve drawing boundaries, putting things in bounds and out of bounds.

  “Man is a stranger to man, and a stranger he must remain: that is one of the fundamental decrees in this loners’ corral. And so it goes in their crazy, upside-down world, wherever one turns: as a stateless person, each acts only on his own behalf, as if that were part and parcel of his loner’s consciousness, and at the same time, between one and three thousand consistent rules, norms, and unwritten authoritarian edicts have found their way into this loners’ outpost.

  “Of late I even see a communal flag waving above the rocky crest in the middle of the glacial lake, which is just about the precise center of the Hondareda colony, although otherwise not a soul goes there, a flag with the peak of the Almanzor woven into it, and to the right and left of it, as the heraldic animals, the almost black, hardly spotted Almanzor salamander and, no, neither the red kite nor the Hispanic chamois, but the extraordinarily small Sierra hedgehog, which one might mistake for a silver thistle. Thistle or hedgehog? What can you make out at this distance? You have better eyes than I, who am myopic, farsighted, and astigmatic to boot.

  “And although they are all intent on preserving a veritably mythic namelessness and nobodyness, bit by bit names have been adopted for the most nondescript places and wretched spots in their hardship post, official and mandatory names. And although they have beyond any doubt said goodbye forever, good night, and fare thee well to history, the present, and the light of logic, these names for the most part refer to time, light, reason, and presentness.

  “A patch of meadow, for instance, with nothing but a few granite outcroppings and arching wild rose canes, is called, God only knows why, ‘The Meadow of Reason,’ ‘El Prado de la Razón’; a beaten track that zigzags among the randomly situated living cubes—not even a real path or walkway, a mere system of gaps, where time and again one must flatten oneself to slip through, almost labyrinthine—is called ‘Passage of Things to Come,’ ‘Passage de l’Avenir’; and the rocky island in the laguna?—‘Corso of the Third Era,’ ‘Corso di Terzo Tempo,’ corso because it is approximately circular and level—but a corso on which the likes of us have never yet seen a single Hondaredero strolling? either in the evening or at any other time? let alone the entire population of the town, as would be the case on a normal corso?

  “Altogether, although these people have obviously left the great cities behind them, all their placeless and faceless urban features carry names like ‘Plaza … ,’ ‘Avenida … ,’ ‘Boulevard … ,’ ‘Rambla … ,’ ‘New Square,’ also ‘Esplanade … ,’ ‘Promenade … ,’ ‘Quai … ,’ and the like.

  “And I see the world most grotesquely turned upside down in a cult of dew in which my Hondarederos indulge—yes, you heard me right: dew, nadan, rosée, rocio—which, besides the wetness from the clear sky, is, here on the Iberian peninsula, also a lovely woman’s name, without doubt the most lovely.

  “Just think: in their crazed eyes it is not a cult but a science: the science of dew, and they view themselves as the dew scientists of the Pleasant Plantation, located in the central massif of the Sierra de Gredos, like the nuclear or microchip or macro-hard scientists of Silicon or Micomicon or Peppermint Valley.

  “What feeds their folly, to be sure, is the fact that in this mountain basin the dew falls more heavily than perhaps anywhere else, and that in the daytime sun, which does not dry it up but rather allows the dewdrops to flow into each other, the dew forms veritable torrents, brooks, and cataracts, falling with a strange softness and almost soundlessly over the smooth cliff walls—massive quantities of water from the merging of dewdrops, collecting in the natural basins created by the glacier on the granite floor of the valley, and also captured in specially installed ponds, from which the settlers draw the dew water directly or channel it through gutters and pipes, pipeline-like! to their houses.

  “That they use it for drinking, washing, and cooking is actually almost a fine thing—after all, precisely in the mountains the rest of the water is contaminated by grazing animals, by airplanes, and in general, and thus unwholesome, even toxic; I, too, have grown used, over time, to drinking the special dewdrop liquid—I like the taste—and to washing with it every morning, even my hair, without shampoo, and how soft it comes out! but everything else they do with their dew up here already crosses the line of foolishness into the kingdom of fools—their dew-fools’ kingdom, which is also dangerous.

  “Now listen to this: by now the entire region is dotted with dew wells, roofed over, fenced in, also strictly guarded, as are elsewhere drilling towers in the most productive oil fields. With the exception of a few pathetic little rock crystals, the entire Sierra de Gredos has almost no mineral resources, and accordingly the people here speak of their “air resources,” among which the dew is the primary one. They treat dew as their chief capital, and also intend, as I have observed, to exploit it commercially and market it.

  “I know: my Hondaredians will bottle the dew water in flasks, spray cans, tubes, canisters, barrels, in order to sell it and to become powerful through the dew business. I can prove that you fellows are poised to sell your dew not only as drinking water but also as medicines to treat all imaginable deficiencies and disorders, for external and internal use: dew products for acne, insect bites, snakebites, eye problems, cellulite, as well as for heart palpitations, colic, chronic fatigue, nightmares, loss of appetite, obesity, and, finally, even for melanchol
y, loneliness, fear of death, murderous impulses, schizophrenia, hopelessness, malaise, inability to love in all its manifestations, or, more precisely, forms of atrophy and wasting. Dew water boosts your libido!—that is the slogan they plan to launch. And another: Dew from the Sierra de Gredos: the secret of a radiant skin!

  “With a view to such a market, which you intend, not without justified optimism, to expand step by step into a worldwide market, you plan to manufacture your dew products in solid form as well, as powder, pastilles, pills, buffered with atomized mountain fruits, such as juniper berry, rowanberry, moss berry, and so on. If one of you actually happens to be a dew scientist, I must tell you that to me this science is by no means pure anymore—dew, schmew: as the scientist conducts his dew research in apparent innocence, examining the dew under a microscope, mixing it, assaying reactions, he has his eye fixed firmly on profits and a monopoly.

  “I have obtained copies of all of your scientific papers, most of them lengthy and seemingly tedious, on topics such as ‘The Form of Dewdrops on Grasses in Contrast to Dew Formations on Stones, Sand, Gravel, and Glass,’ ‘Multiplicated Accumulation of Dew on Smooth Granite Surfaces as a Result of Increased Nocturnal Solar Radiation in the Mountains,’ ‘The Dew Sphere as Collecting Lens for the Color Spectrum,’ ‘Erroneous Flights of Sierra Moths to the Dew Meadows, or Simulation of Mating Invitations by Dew Glitter,’ ‘Varying Dew Phenomena on Oak Leaves, Larch Needles, Bird Feathers—in Particular on Jackdaws, Mountain Cocks, and Peregrine Falcons—and Further on Wild-Boar Bristles, Human Hair, and Animal Pelts, with Particular Attention to So-Called Dew-Licks and Dew-Spirals on Cows, Goats, and Sheepdogs,’ ‘The Riddle of Black Dew: An Attempt at an Explanation’: but not one of these dew deliriums did not have thrumming in the background your insane notion of achieving fame and fortune by means of this natural resource.