Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  Another factor in his case was that he was gravely ill and knew that he would die today or tomorrow, and up here in the high Sierra, not in the monastery of Yuste in the southern Piedmont, like the historical Charles. He had dragged himself, alone in the end, without his litter and bearers, up here and down into the pit of Hondareda, to end his days in this place, and that would occur in a manner entirely different from down near the plain—just the way he imagined his death, if it had to be now; wished it; wanted it.

  Besides, he had had enough of kingship and emperorship, his own and in general. Over and done with, once and for all. What was it they said about kings? During their entire lives they had to be there for others and do nothing but listen from morn till night. And what had poor Louis the Sixteenth, on the evening before his beheading, impressed upon his son? A stern, bitter dictum: “Beware of being king!”

  And yet this Carlos remained of two minds up to the hour of his death, or he was, as another of those apocryphal authors chimed in, “downright schizophrenic”: his abdication and also the general disappearance or disempowerment of kings struck him as perfectly fine—and a second age of kings, like the “second age of judges,” heaven forbid!—and, conversely, as he looked back on the life in society that he, split personality or not, imaginary king or not, had left behind when he set out for the Sierra de Gredos, his own renunciation seemed a bit hasty, to say the least, as he saw before him, like a waking nightmare, the individual members of that society, in which meanwhile almost everyone had become his own king and self-appointed emperor, with ears for no one and nothing else, day in, day out, and if at one moment he was the soul of serenity and even wanted to lay his hands on his contemporaries, who had become so foreign to him, to perform the miracle of healing, in the next moment he wanted to curse them royally, as in bygone times. Wasn’t he striving, after all, to regain his kingship? Yes, but more in the sense of a counter-king. He wanted to serve as a counter-king and a counter-emperor for his contemporaries.

  Not until the day of his death was he in fact completely reconciled to what he had renounced. His being or playing at being king no longer mattered. The dream was over, and with it the split personality. He was simply the person he had been during his time there in Hondareda: the archivist, not in Simancas or some such place in the historical world, but for the new settlement—his cooking/living/sleeping hovel, with stacks, drawers, cupboards full of documentation, documentary stones, documentary plants, a concentrated memorial to everything that Hondareda would have been.

  And at the end the abdicated king and emperor was also no longer an archivist but simply the dying man, with the Spanish flies around his mouth more numerous than ever, who muttered that he hoped he “hadn’t spoiled the party for you”—what party?—and whose lips, after his death, still moved, in total silence, as if to continue speaking, and finally, for a long, long time, only the lower lip, that protruding lip characteristic of his royal line. And not until after his death did the sounds of pain he had suppressed all his life escape. Before that, he—with his soul already between his teeth—to her: “I regret only that I cannot read your, and my, story to the end.” Although he was letting himself die, he broke off several attempts. And when he finally succeeded, a child standing by his bedside clapped. Then a few adults standing around clapped as well. And toward the end they all applauded him, and how.

  And she? had looked that day away from the man who had just died and gazed through the opening in the rock to the outside, which was not at all deathly still, or rather into the window slit in the back of the building next door, slightly off center, which let one see through a third house, and beyond that through the next of the little windows in the rock, and thus through the house with the corpse to the next and the next and the next, all the way to the end of the row and on through the last of the windows and finally at a tiny yellow-gray-blue segment, all the more clearly in focus, of the granite surface that formed the summit plain of the Sierra, and against that backdrop the inhabitants bustling hither and yon, from dwelling to dwelling, or lounging, or reading, just as on a moving train one can look from a car up front, near the locomotive, back through all the other cars, and see the passengers from compartment to compartment to compartment, and behind the train the vanishing landscape.

  Another of the transitional travelers, after he had beckoned her into his cottage, no doubt told her that the reason for his being here, if indeed there was a reason, was the light. Another: here at long last he did not understand a word, no longer had to hear his own language, its sounds and accent. And one person explained that he had left his country not because, as was often said, it was too limiting or insignificant or trivial, but actually the opposite, for at least to outward appearances, with its natural resources and especially its economic power, which gave rise to other forms of power, it had suddenly no longer been so limiting and insignificant, and then had become so powerful and finally even more powerful than in its glory days. And one person said he had set out for this region as a reader, as the reader of a long, long story that was set here in the Sierra, about a woman and her vanished lover.

  And one day in Hondareda she also came upon her own would-be lover from the riverport city: as she now wanted it to be for her story, he had forgotten her, or had he? and he was thriving. And in the course of time she saw yet another person from home: the idiot of the outskirts—and the change of locale to the high Sierra seemed to have done him good likewise. His idiocy, which when expressed day in, day out, on the outskirts, with their identical curbs and the front lawns all mowed to exactly the same height, wore thin, flourished up here near the stratosphere, among the lichen-covered cliffs, got a second wind—was that expression still in use?—and adapted to the doings of the others.

  And finally the story wanted the andariega to see in one of the new settlers her brother, recently released from prison, who she thought was in an entirely different country, committing his first act of violence directed not at things but at human beings, from which there would be no turning back.

  And the person who appeared to her as her surviving brother—although outwardly there was little similarity to discover—or out of whom the supposedly lost brother spoke, said, as they shared an evening meal, at an hour unusually early for the Iberian Peninsula, in his living shed/storeroom /warehouse, approximately the following:

  “I could already feel killing in my upper arms and my fingertips. Now! I said to myself one morning when I woke up lying next to yet another stranger, a woman who had called to me on the street the previous night as I was heading for yet another railroad station: ‘Wait for me!’ The woman claimed to have known me for a long time. And my absence, to quote her verbatim, had lasted ‘for centuries.’ How rough and at the same time tender her sex was. I had never encountered anything so rough yet so soft before. And as with all the other women, I never saw this stranger again. And with the passage of time I became her admirer. If you meet her, give her my best. I adore her. And I am sure she knows it, even if she will never hear me say it. And perhaps she will read in your story that we met not here and not there but in a third country that was at war.

  “And I was in that country because of the war. I wanted to be in the war to take part in the killing. So there would be at least one less of these mindless and soulless two-legged creatures who are everywhere and nowhere nowadays, taking up space and even being paid handsomely for it! And that morning the moment had finally arrived! Off to clear the decks! And even though I was armed, I would do it with my bare hands, or with a stick—the whole combat zone was strewn with sticks and stones. And I would not kill an adversary or an enemy—I considered those of us on the two warring sides to be not enemies but woeful comrades in arms or whatever—but rather someone who was not directly involved, one of those bystanders who, as has become customary or fitting in wars in third countries, instead of trying to prevent war actually incite and whip it up, at the same time turning it into a business opportunity, or rather the side
walk superintendents and kibitzers with whom the place was swarming.

  “My grandfather was in the first world conflict and my father in the second, and both of them told me that it never crossed their minds to want to shoot at a so-called enemy, and to the very end they made a special effort to aim so as to miss. In contrast, however: death and destruction to those on both sides who had sent them off to fight one another and turned the killing and dying into a spectacle—except that neither my grandfather nor my father ever had a chance to look these ‘devils’ or ‘charlatans, ’ as both of them called those responsible, in the eye or lay hands on them.

  “On that day in my war I was assigned to a unit that was actually deployed to keep a fire-free zone open, secure a transit route, provide safe conduct. With a few others I was posted along a river in the mountains, at a ford where the road crossed the river at a shallow spot. At some point during the day, I saw, way off down the road on the other side of the river, a man walking alone, making his way through the bushes that had grown far into the travel lane since the war began. He was obviously not native to the area—although the civilian natives in the war zone had long since lost any native characteristics, by which I mean any sense of time and place, and were constantly mistaking yesterday for today, or for a day in the previous year, and constantly losing their way in their own village and even in their own house and grounds. No, that is not the one I am going to do away with, I thought, not yet. But the next one, from the Third Column, that of the sightless ones, in the armored personnel carriers with nineteen times nineteen banners waving!

  “The lone pedestrian came to the ford. And at the same moment a vehicle actually appeared behind him, not armored, true, but instead seemingly disguised, and the car stopped, and a few actually masked men jumped out, some of the ones who were waging their own special, uncontrollable, and also, thanks to the masks, absolutely ruthless war-within-a-war. And one of the masked men, all of whom were wearing long, dust-colored greatcoats as if to be ready for being filmed, promptly took aim at the man who was wading through the ford with his pant legs rolled up. With the rushing of the water it was almost inaudible at first. But then I heard nothing but gunfire.

  “And the gunfire—in the parents’ cries here in Hondareda I hear the pow-pow-pow again—continued even after the corpse was already floating downstream. The masked man at the ford went on shooting at the dead man while his masked comrades kept us pinned down. I opened my eyes wide. Can one even say that of oneself? Yes, I, I opened my eyes wide. And my eyes were opened. And above the murdered man I saw the open sky. And I, I was innocent. I am innocent, I thought. And never, never will I kill anyone. And altogether: an end to revenge!

  “And I was almost, almost grateful to that killer, grateful that he had saved me, saved me from my chief obsession, my obsession with murdering people. How tender was the sex of that woman who had called to me from behind that night on the street leading to the railroad station. Clasping me tenderly. And how noble. Noble and dark and wide, and above all special. And it was not only we who were together there in the night. Outside her apartment window stood a birch tree. A kind of millrace flowed past the house. And in the next room her child was sleeping.”

  The evening on which she saw the person out of whom she heard her brother speaking was bright, with spring just around the corner, and outside on the mountain steppe a few of the reporters were running to their helicopter. And at the sight of them her host involuntarily made a gesture like aiming a machine gun at the string of runners, pressing the trigger and spraying them with bullets.

  He had even leaped to his feet and pushed open the window. The last deep-yellow rays of the sun shone on the walls of smooth-polished granite, and one equally yellow Sierra hornet, smaller than those in the valleys but with wings that droned all the more loudly, came shooting at the shooter, swerving just in time to miss him, and he jumped back, as only her brother could jump back, easily startled, especially by small things, and it was almost, almost all right with her that even Hondareda did not lie outside the labyrinthine world.

  36

  She scaled the gentle northern slopes and reached the crest of the Sierra with the last light of day. In the old books the word used for ridge or crest was “eyelash.”

  At one time there had been a crossing here, a path used mainly for driving the livestock over the ridge, worn by the cattle themselves, the only human addition being the road markers on the rocks consisting of very small, narrow columns of stones. These still existed here and there. But they had either toppled over or been overgrown by the little forests of broom. It was better not to try to locate them and risk being misled by these unreliable signs, which might just as well be chance heaps of weathered rock. Instead one should feel one’s own way, one step at a time.

  And that had to be possible on the almost bare, steep, rock-strewn descent to the south. Standing on the ridge, she saw the lights far, far below in Candeleda, where it was already night in the small town that now appeared much larger from her sky-high vantage point, the lights forming an island of light in the sea of blackish gray and black black that stretched to the horizon in almost every direction. Only in the west could one still see blue strips, one above the other, and the top one almost bright blue. It was the same blue as in the uppermost and outer wing portion of that white angel on the lost or stolen medallion. “If the angel had not gone missing,” she said to herself, “I would not see its wing color in that blue over there.”

  Although no path leading down the mountain was evident anywhere, along this section of the ridge one could safely cross and head downhill. The air was clear way down into the lowlands. Far in the distance the outlines of the Montes de Toledo, the mountains of Toledo. The wind wafting up from below was mild. The remaining snow patches and snowfields apparently behind her. The jagged peaks and escarpments of the summit plain of the Almanzor, the little knives, the Galayos, and the Galana disappeared behind the nearer, more rounded peaks. Gone, too, the depression of Hondareda. As she looked around, only the faint glow from a few seemingly inaccessible villages on the slopes, above the high valley of the río Tormes; Pedrada, too, the stone-pelting place in the headwaters region, gone.

  Now came the moment when she wished she were home on her own property on the outskirts of the riverport city, or under her fruit trees there. Never had she experienced such indecisiveness in herself, just at the point in her journey and her hike where her destination lay at her feet, and not only figuratively. This amused her even more than it took her by surprise. One step forward, one step back, one to the left, one to the right. And her initially jerky, puppet-like indecisiveness—her gaze, likewise, jerking forward, then back over her shoulder, then up to the summit, then down to the ground—produced a kind of harmony, as if the indecisiveness and the hesitating gradually became dance steps (and, accordingly, she later told the author about her “dance of indecision” up there on the crest of the Sierra de Gredos).

  And then emerging, thanks to this dancing, from her back-and-forth hesitation, she really, without any as-if, gained the momentum for a decision, the indecisiveness now transformed into decisiveness: time to be on her way! onward, down into the nocturnal blackness, which, once one plunged into it, had a clarity of its own. That wood-road with protruding tree roots at home on the outskirts of the city came to mind, but not because she still wished to be back there, where in the layered and intertwined roots the mountains and foothills and base of the mountains here had appeared to her in miniature, in peaceable and harmless form: no, this purely playful format of the Sierra de Gredos now revealed itself on location: it was a matter of crossing and leaping over the mighty Sierra in her mind’s eye just as light-footedly and quickly as over the layered roots at home in front of her own house.

  And already she was running and leaping downhill, in imaginary serpentines, an asendereada, which usually meant “a woman who has strayed from the path,” but not here, where for the first stretch of the path (yes, path), as she
drifted off as if in a drift originating inside her and safeguarding her, nothing could go wrong, and for the moment she was the mistress of her story again.

  Leaping from ridge to ridge, as back there at home from one root branch to another. What contributed to her current sense of security was the phenomenon that one of the settlers in Hondareda, a rock expert, had once described in her presence as the “rhythm of the Sierra de Gredos.” According to him, the Sierra was a rhythmic formation in the sense that, whether on the gentle northern face or the steep southern face, the many chimneys, clefts, gorges, rivulets, and torrents fanned out evenly, the result of reciprocal action of water and the granite bedrock, which had created a relief characterized by rhythmic regularity, without the distortions, gaps, dislocations, and “unpleasant surprises” one often encountered in sandstone or limestone mountains, which consisted of masses that had been blown in or been deposited from elsewhere, rather than of original bedrock.

  And that rhythmic quality, according to her geologist, also communicated itself to anyone hiking through the Sierra—the rhythm of the ground under his feet assured evenness, order, and controllability in his movement, “at least for the time being” (“for the time being” was also a much-used expression among the new settlers).

  And as the asendereada cast her thoughts back to Hondareda once more, she said, again to herself, in the very penetrable darkness surrounding her descent from the mountain: “Lost country. Authentic country. Leaving behind the authentic country for one’s own lostness! What a rhythm that creates. What energy. I know who you all are. Of mixed blood, like me. How fortunate to be alive in the time when the last homogeneous people ceases to exist. A rich time. Fullness of time.” She almost sang this, like an old hit. But the moment had not yet come for her song. It was only the time for a greeting, sent in the direction of the glacial basin settlement, a greeting after the farewell, as if imagined in an Arabic poem.