Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  The last mountain crickets chirped, up above and down below. And upon hearing them, Jakob Lebel recalled that, after all, there was a kind of plan for the day in Hondareda, repeated time and again, and it went: “Go out and listen to the crickets!” And he wished that the crickets, with their incredibly tender voices, might perform for his burial here. Did he want to die, then, here in Hondareda? Yes. But first he wanted to live here.

  “Jakob Lebel”? That simply could not be the name of an enemy.

  35

  No doubt she, too, looked back at the hummock on which she had been standing only a short while ago, and at Hondareda, or Hondoneda, down below. Sometimes, when one stepped out of a house or a pub onto the street and looked in through a window at the place one had just left, didn’t one feel surprised at no longer seeing oneself inside, sitting at the table or wherever one had been a few seconds earlier, reading, writing, talking to someone, and might that not give rise to a hallucination—of oneself?

  This is what the woman experienced as she set out and glanced over her shoulder at the now vacant rocky mound, and this is how she later described it to the author. The hallucination, the residual image, of herself was so compelling that her astonishment was accompanied by shock. She recoiled at the flickering silhouette there, as if that “Me!” were something sinister, or rather something that made one shudder, not the way one would shudder at a ghost or some other alarming phantom, a menacing one: Didn’t this recoiling, followed by pausing and doing a double take, also make one stronger? (Like her brother, she was both brave and easily startled, and there was the family legend that this propensity for being startled went back to that night when they were still children and someone came dashing into the house with the news that their parents and their other brother had died in an accident.)

  And Hondareda in the glacial trough? As she looked down, it seemed at first not even to exist anymore, and for this verb “to seem,” according to the author in La Mancha, the Spanish term traslucir, or “shine through,” would probably have been wrong: for all that showed of the Dark Clearing was the darkness, a black hole in the middle of the otherwise brightly dusky high Sierra.

  But then the labyrinthine settlement appeared all the more distinct in the darkness, with a more intense glittering of the mica, a glowing of the veins of quartz, a shimmering of the lichen: the latter, coating the cliffs as well as the rocky roofs throughout the basin with a yellowish-greenish-grayish film, made the town look like a city of millions, like Shanghai or São Paulo, photographed from a satellite halfway between the earth and the moon.

  But to the same backward glance how small our Hondareda looked, and then, as she walked backward, how it gradually shrank still more. And at the same time a roar rose from the former ice basin, a roar such as might have come from a normally quiet area that was flooded in all directions as far as the horizon, the roar coming from the bottom of a river, still coursing along its channel even as it spilled over its banks, “the roar of the Mississippi.” And in the roar one could also make out a kind of buzzing, which brought to mind the many newly installed apiaries on those slopes that were bathed in sunshine at almost all times of day—nowhere was the sun warmer and more constant than up here in the mountains—the apiaries also serving some of the settlers as dwellings, which one of her hosts took as a pretext for renaming Hondareda “El Nuevo Colmenar,” which translated approximately as “New Beehive” (a reversal of a name very common on the Iberian highland, “El Viejo Colmenar,” “Old Beehive”). And from this evening-warm incessant buzzing a single voice emerged, that of a child, not crying but shouting, rising unmistakably above all the underlying sounds: “Warte auf mich! Wait for me! Attends-moi! Es-pérame!” Now at nightfall the mighty rushing sound of the bees, and many bright, piercing tones.

  Finally, when she was already an arrow-shot away from the ridge of the Sierra and the crossing point—off to one side of the Candeleda Pass—to the steep drop of the massif to the south, and the settlement behind her already out of cannon- and mortar-fire range, if not of rocket range, she could make out down below distant silhouettes, which, as they strolled alone along the only remaining bright feature of the landscape, the lake, the sky-mirroring laguna, were constantly ducking for no apparent reason, and in the trackless mountain steppe, before they crossed from one granite mound to another, whipped their dim profiles around, as if they were about to cross a dangerous boulevard with vehicles whizzing by.

  And in the end she could no longer see any clear image of Hondareda or Hondoneda (the most recent maps mention the place only in parentheses, if at all), and instead, to the accompaniment of her steps crunching in the stones and scree, with stretches of quartz sand and snow in between, a litany consisting only of place names came to her: Nuevo Colmenar, Deep Enclosure, Dark Clearing, El Barco de la Sierra, Fondamente Nuove, New Briar Hole, Wandering Dune, High Lowland—just as the mountains of the summit plain, now at eye level, became transformed into pure names, and more and more were added to Galana (The Elegant One), Hermanitos (Little Brothers), Mira (= Look!), Morezón (from Moro: Moor, Arab?), Almanzor. Liturgy of preservation! It had been a long time since she had attended mass. “Attended”? Yes, attended. Yet there was hardly anything that completed one more than being present for the holy liturgy. Liturgy: oh, my goodness.

  So had she left no farewell present for the transitory people of Hondareda, whom she had once spoken of as “mine”? Nothing—nothing at all. She had even taken something away from them—pilfered something (see “fruit thief”). While she was making the rounds in the plantation there as a guest, and told one of her hosts about her early days as a fruit thief back in the village, he replied that for him, too, now soon to be an old man, climbing into a tree still meant a good beginning to a day or a happy day. She, “friend of thieves and lost souls”? A thief and lost soul herself?

  In the course of time each of the immigrants in Hondareda had shared his story with her. The main point, for each, was his reasons for being here, but then came a whole slew of events that had nothing to do with that. The more the individual got into the swing of his narrative, the more the elements of the story became jumbled, which did not mean that his story was confused. It seemed rather to have taken place so long ago that now it was true again. What became clear, even without reasons: the way he or she had left a familiar region, homeland, state, confederation, etc., and that he or she would remain here now—where else?—though not necessarily forever.

  Some of them invented their reasons, for the most part obviously flimsy ones—“I was running away from today’s women!”—“I wanted to escape the male world!”—“I did not want to die a rich man!”—so as to hint that in reality they had had entirely different reasons, or none at all, or that the reasons were not all that important to their story.

  What gave an impetus to the speaking as well as the listening each time was first the sharing of a meal between the two of them (even days and months afterward, when she was already somewhere else entirely, she had an aftertaste, all the more fresh, of those Hondareda meals in her mouth), and then also the fact that the new settlers’ individual dwellings, despite their markedly private nature, all had the feel of a public or generally accessible space—not in the sense of gathering places, public offices, community halls, or churches, but of alehouses or dives, albeit without the ill repute; divelike simply because the dining table was always set up in the innermost recesses of the inhabited cave, and could have accommodated, in addition to the two of them and perhaps a child doing homework at the other end, various total strangers, who also seemed to be expected. To sit deep inside these caves with the aura of dives sharpened one’s attention and helped one collect oneself (was this expression still current?).

  Thus one day, or one evening, she heard from a settler to whose table—at other times a workbench and various other things—she was invited, that he had left the land of his origin “out of sheer boredom. It was not my country in particular that bored me. Nor was it t
he climate. Or my work. It was sheer boredom, total and all-encompassing.

  “True, even as a child and then, in a different way, as a youth, I was sometimes bored. But only sometimes, in certain places, in conjunction with certain activities, and primarily when I had no one or nothing to play with, and in my adolescence when I was terribly alone. Except that this kind of boredom became increasingly tolerable as I got older, for I imagined that later on, in my profession, I would no longer be alone, and that in love, or what I imagined love would be like, everything would be different.

  “And what I imagined did not deceive me. From a time that cannot be pinpointed, once love arrived? once hate arose? once I found pleasure in action and inaction, also in taking care of things, in acting and thinking in concert with others, also in mere watching, I was no longer bored. At last I felt alive, one way or the other, even in sorrow and rage, and always, and in the thick of things—never lacking for excitement.

  “And I imagined that from this moment on I would continue to be like those I had once envied, those who seemed to be basking in a realm inaccessible to me, who said of themselves: Bored? I have no idea what that means!

  “My imagination turned out to have tricked me after all. In another period—known as the transition, right?—which cannot be pinpointed or dated, boredom returned, neither from one moment to the next nor from one day or year to the next. It did not come over me all of a sudden, but sneaked up on me—certain clichés, only a few, can hit the nail on the head, if not used too often—interposing itself between me and events, persons, things, places.

  “First, I do not know when, one thing bored me, then several things, then everything. And even then I did not know that it was boredom—initially I felt only slight discomfort, which in the end became huge. For, truth be told, this was not a recurrence of the boredom familiar to me from my childhood and youth, an appropriate, healthy, or at least not unhealthy boredom, but rather a sickness, something without a name, and calling it ‘boredom’ or ‘nameless’ was merely an expression of my confusion and helplessness. Sickness and madness. It became a boredom as hopeless as it was deadly: on the one hand, I was hopelessly sick with it, and on the other hand, I was driven in my insane boredom to exterminate and destroy. ‘You bore me’ meant the same thing as: ‘My child bores me,’ as: ‘My house bores me,’ as: ‘The forest bores me,’ and also, yes, ‘I bore myself ’—and it meant a compulsion to do away with you, my child, the forest, and myself.

  “And so I had to get out, to come here. And at least here I am rid of that kind of boredom. And by now I even imagine that I am on my way to a third kind of boredom here, one in which, just as before, time will seem to stretch, but in an entirely different way. This morning I walked across a snowfield and kept sinking in with my left leg, never with my right. In front of me in the snow, I swear to God, a snake was crawling along, and then a giant dragonfly with a yellow head was swooping over the ice floes in the lake.”

  Another person whose hospitality she enjoyed for a while said that he had originally come to the region to do glacier research—his specialty: the hollows left by the melted glacial masses, together with their microclimate, vegetation, and so forth—and then he had decided on the spur of the moment to stay here, to continue his research and simply to stay.

  The next person who took her in presented himself to her as someone who, in his place of origin, had been obsessed with searching—searching for treasures, as well as for this little thing or that—with searching in general, and in Hondareda, where there was nothing to search for, and all the treasures, if there had been any to discover there, had already been extracted, he finally felt free of his compulsion, especially of his narrow, and narrowing, searcher’s gaze, and free, for what? For now, simply free.

  Others among the founders told her their stories: of being descended from a tribe of missionaries, involved for centuries in converting everything they came across, anywhere in the world, and of having put this tribe and its missionary zeal behind them once they set out for or returned here; or: having become, in their distant country of origin, in the course of life as petty-minded as their neighbors, in fact several degrees more crotchety, more narrow-minded, more malicious—more mean and nasty, lying in wait for some misfortune to strike next door, an accident, a separation, a death—one simply had to escape from an environment that turned one into a person like that!; or they told of inheriting from their ancestors, handed down from generation to generation, over there in Peru, Arizona, Ecuador, Honduras (!), the sense that the mere mention of the Sierra de Gredos and of Hondareda was the magic word at the right moment, “like a lit match”; or having been inspired to come here simply by the names, or by the sound of one name or another along the way, the sound of “El Almanzor,” “El Puerto de Candeleda,” “río Tormes,” “río Bar-bellido,” “La Galana,” “La Angostura,” “Ramacastañas.”

  One of them explained to her, and he was perfectly serious, that he had come to Hondareda from Tokyo, or was it Honolulu? or Cairo? and then settled there because he wanted to feel that he was “finally in a hub” again, in a place and a region “where something mattered,” “where something could be seen happening”—what could be seen?—no answer—but then she had not asked, either.

  And then another in his dinner-table monologue (she always had the impression that the entire colony of settlers was sitting at the table with the two of them): here in the trough in the high Sierra he had begun to dream again; the closed-off or remote nature of the region produced (yes) particularly cosmopolitan dreams, also—expansive dreams, in which he himself participated only as part of an audience—“but how I participate! More involved than I ever was in my time as a protagonist!”—epic dreams, whose vividness stayed with him when he woke up, and represented “capital” for the day, for being and acting awake, value (it took no special talent to guess that the speaker here was her former co-director at the world or central bank, or whatever it was called or may have been called—who seemed, by the way, to have forgotten his partner, or at least acted as though he had).

  And for a while she had been the guest of a former judge—as for her other hosts, she unobtrusively took over the household chores, or served as a sort of barmaid—who among other things at one point wound up to offer more or less the following account: “In the thousands of years of recorded human history, we have already had one age of judges. It is supposed to have been a heroic era, a pioneering time, a time of preparation, the time before the age of kings and then of emperors. The people’s judges were also the rulers or leaders, the generals, the administrators, and the high priests. But their chief title was that of judge.” As fate or chance would have it, at this moment the ex-judge’s grandnephew or foster son stuck his head into the cave, which, as everywhere in H., grew increasingly grand the deeper one advanced into it, and asked, “Did you call me?” Her host said no, and continued: “And in my time out there and down below, it was an age of judges again, a different one, and with different judges. I myself come from a family of judges. All the men and then all the women in this family practiced the judge’s profession, without much effort, simply following a tradition that had the force of law. But I wanted to have been the last in our family line! With me and through me we were to become extinct as judges. And so I have broken out of the family tradition, at least for the time being, and am no longer in office. Never again to judge, to hand down verdicts, to convict. Never again to base my entire existence on being a judge, and at the same time to destroy another’s existence, or at least put it in jeopardy. For this second age of judges, as it was still in force down/out there until just a while ago, yes, or is still in force, was, as I know, for I was part of it, no return to that pioneering era but rather an age of terror, a new one and a new kind.

  “The second age of judges was, or is, one of unlimited, arbitrary, and uncontrolled despotism, masquerading as an obligation to intervene in anything and everything—and a despotism no longer confined to individuals
but all-inclusive. For anyone can claim to belong to the family of judges, and every man and every woman can cast, and casts, him- or herself with unequaled self-aggrandizement as the judge of everything and everyone, as the judge of the whole world. And these judges of the world want to be something that fortunately no one else wants to be anymore, or perhaps not? They want to be world rulers in their own way. And a result of that was, and is, that now none of the innumerable judges will himself tolerate being judged by the world.”

  Again the boy poked his head in the door, but this time he said, “I knocked over the milk can”—whereupon his foster father replied, as if in jest, “An hour of detention in the cellar, without light, and for a month a hard cot and lights on, you useless good-for-nothing!” and continued, “Anything but to be a judge again! In my time, that means the time now, after my time as a judge!” (And was not he the one who had proclaimed that stealing an apple from a stranger’s tree should be viewed as daybreak in the middle of the day?)

  For a while the abdicated queen of finance was also hosted by the likewise abdicated “king” and “emperador.” He was one of those in Hondareda who lived entirely alone, without grandchildren or other descendants. And it was not only because during her time as his guest she did the household chores for him in his “royal palace” or Palacio Real that the old man viewed her as if she had been the one who took him in when he was abandoned in the high steppe.

  His palace was located in a cul-de-sac, part of the rocky chaos like the majority of the other buildings, though even more huddled, more crooked, and more like a hideout, and like the others who had found their way there, this Charles the Fifth or the First exuded the quiet sadness of a widower, and occasionally the delicate loneliness of an orphan.