by Peter Handke
The stumbling became a tripping. The tripping became a fall. The fall became a general capsizing. The adventurer tumbled head over heels into the fern forest, which was full of holes and hollows not mentioned in the “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”: no reason to fault it, for these depressions were all rather shallow and quite well padded with the fallen and rotting fern fronds from the past, and thus, in the terms of the “Guía de peligros,” no real danger, and certainly not in comparison to the actually dangerous neveros, or snow holes, where, on a seemingly smooth surface, one could sink from one step to the next up to one’s neck, and deeper, into an apparently harmless patch of snow.
The danger here in the fern forest was of an essentially different kind. Her fall, caused by the abrupt loss of images, was a small fall on the outside and a large fall on the inside. Yes, first came the loss of images, and only then did she get tangled in her own feet, which caused her to tip sideways, fall, and roll over and over, although she had not fallen from much of a height. What the images, the image, and the loss of images mean and bring about: that will be the subject of the epilogue—her conversation with the author in the village in La Mancha.
For the moment she lay on the ground surrounded by ferns, invisible from the outside as well as from above, on her stomach, motionless. In a close-up her torso would have been heaving violently yet almost inaudibly as she breathed, like that of a sheep sleeping. Just so, people with severe injuries, even if they were fully conscious and felt no pain, instead of trying to get up, would instinctively remain lying on the spot without moving, as if simply to raise their head or bend a toe would mean the end of them. So was she injured? No, it was worse: felled by the extinguishing flash marking the loss of images, coming on the heels of the hopelessly jumbled series of image flashes, and now visited on her and the world, she was going through death, as it were (without “as it were”). That was how the story wanted it to be. That was the story (which is neither a fable nor a legend, and also no fairy tale).
And she accepted the idea of perishing. Hadn’t she, hadn’t one, foundered long since, in existence, in life, in relationships, and didn’t that now finally become obvious in the loss of images, brought on almost intentionally? The sweetness of acceptance. To disappear from the face of the earth: as it should be.
On the other hand, acceptance did not mean wanting to die. She had never felt anything like a longing for death, and certainly did not now. How incomprehensible she found the sentence “I look forward to dying.” True, even before the crossing of the Sierra, she had counted on perishing. But if she were close to it, one thing was clear: she would fight for her life to the last. For her life? For life.
And so now she girded herself to resist, at first only inwardly, yet where else would one begin? And as had always been the case with her, this taking action, like all her doings, was a form of management—and didn’t one say, instead of “I must find a way out,” “I must manage to get out of this situation”? While she lay there, not moving a finger, her thoughts were already focused on managing again: budgeting, measuring, calculating, ordering, surveying, projecting, taking precautions, planning. Except that no plan for forging ahead presented itself, or, in her words: no managerial opportunity. For in her terms, rather than “It’s all over,” the conclusion was “There is nothing more to manage!”
It was of her own free will that she then decided to remain lying this way in the ferns, in the death zone, for the day and one night, el día y una noche.
At least she had one thing in common with the hero of her Miguel’s story: she looked for adventures where there were none to undergo, at least no external, visible ones. And accordingly he, that good-for-nothing, that inept soldier and galley slave, that one-armed son of a quack, would have been the right one to tell her story after all, the only one? But this man Cervantes never did narrate primarily internal adventures such as hers? Or did he? Was it not true that his adventure stories, too, no less than that of the loss-of-images-and-how-one-can-manage-one’s-way-out-of-it, belonged primarily to an interior world, and were for that very reason universal?
39
First of all, so the story goes, the woman who had fallen into the image-loss pit turned onto her back.
Through the gaps in the fern-frond canopy, the daytime sky, high and blue. A period of just lying there in the heart of the Sierra. Springtime or late-fall sunlight penetrating all the way to the ground. On a sunlit stone there, the feathery shadow of a fern, like a fossil from prehistoric times. Or was that not a shadow at all but an actual petrified fern? Intentionally reaching out to touch one of the stinging nettles, which, according to the danger guide, like to “cohabit” with ferns and in the Sierra de Gredos sting “both piercingly and persistently.” (The author, though not particularly familiar with the Sierra, shared her experience one time.)
But even this pain did not help in the absence of a management plan. The only thoughts: meaningless wordplays and spoonerisms—crime waits for yeoman, or: a penny paved is a penny spurned; and so forth.
And then, on the other hand: what a relief no longer to have to be master or mistress of the story, la Señora de la historia, and once and for all. Just as in the chaotic or panicky helter-skelter of the external world one could find a kind of peace or even shelter for a while, so one could in the frantic inner world, at least for as long as it took to inhale and exhale. The tranquil blue sky above the ferns, and another nonsensical thought: all souls’ sky. Nonsensical? The roar of a squadron up there, heading for the high Sierra. The bombers snored, the entire sky filled with their snoring and their terrible heavy load. Hondareda! Did no one but you see and hear this? No one whose heart broke like yours at the sound?
The camera panning from your face to a grasshopper next to it, its eyes—are those eyes?—black like yours, the antennae flailing in midair. Grasshopper, dzarad in Arabic—but even thinking of this word did not help you out. Another pan to—a toad?—no, a frog, not toadlike at all, and too skinny for a toad, so small, hardly as big as a pencil point, as if he has just been transformed from a tadpole, in water, into an amphibious being, and is trying out his first hops on the earth, like a flea (that is how small he was), and now his attempt to get out of the hollow, observed from extremely close up: the tiny fellow scrambling, all his limbs operating alternately as he climbs, the spitting image of the first and last human.
Image? Yes, image, but not of the sort under discussion here. And how had the man-frog come to be here beneath the ferns, so far from his primal element, water? The camera panning back to you, not merely to your face this time, but to your whole body. In her film long ago there had been many such pans.
How glorious—find a different word—a body could look—and not only because of the particular camera angle and the special cinematic lighting—awakening the oldest dreams ever dreamt about a woman, about you. How glorious? How majestic. How childlike—find a different word—how pure—find a different word—like man, woman, and child all in one, but also how simple and touching, for instance a glance at your hands, those fruit-thief hands, which did not even have slippery fingers. But how pulse-quickening, too—find a different word—how heart-pounding (in medieval stories, and thus also in your film, such expressions were never used, yet those love stories were infinitely more physical, corporeal, and steamy than those of today!), how igniting, how kindling, how flame-fanning, how …—God alone knows how, and above all: how delightful such a body can be, how heartening, how amusing.
In the story about you and your man, you were as much admired as desired. There admiring and desiring went together again, and anew. The more you were admired by him, the more intensely—find a different word—the more unconditionally you were desired by him. “My body!” is what he called you in those days, and both his secret exclamations of astonishment, of joy, of wonder, and his equally secret oaths, even when they had nothing to do with you, began with “O body of my woman!” or “On my woman’s body, I swear … (pled
ge … )” What body-travels the two of you undertook, then and there: even when you were both as naked as only a woman and man can be when they are together, you continued to strip each other, of a thousand and one garments, one at a time: another one gone, and another, until you came together truly naked.
Except that even then, from the outset, he, the only one you loved and wanted, saw himself as not your equal and equal to your body, or to put it differently, he was not synchronized with you, or, to put it differently, the fullness of love, or, to put it differently, the fulfillment of love, did not come about for him until you were absent. “Yes, I was never equal to this woman of mine.”
And his vacillating feelings reached the tipping point as the two of you were going through the Sierra de Gredos, you with the child in your womb, shortly before the birth. After you had lost sight of each other for an hour or so, instead of zooming to you from a bow-and-arrow distance, he took to his heels, or he simply stayed where he was and let you climb on alone, in the knowledge that once under way you would not turn back. He fled from you, he hid from you, he left you in the lurch, believing he had led you astray, and not merely outwardly, there in the Sierra, but above all led you astray as a man, with his wanting to be your man.
And as the years passed, he left you without word of himself. And in doing so, he had no sense of privation. For he knew he was incorporated into you from a distance, perhaps even more intensely than you into him. Night after night he disappeared, experiencing himself and being extinguished in you. That sufficed for him.
And one day it no longer sufficed for him. For at last he knew that he was synchronized with you. The discrepancy between his, the man’s, time and your, the woman’s, time was at an end. Or at least that was what he pictured: now, at least, instead of “in his own time,” both your time! Or that is what the story called for. The story decided that the man and woman who have lost each other, seemingly forever, shall come together again, and that is also no myth. “That we may no longer come together on earth, but only in some heaven or paradise—that must not be. And that will not be!”
She lay among the ferns the following night as well. She felt almost at peace. Had it not been for the thirst, which returned, this time a thirst that no blackberries could quench (besides, the last ones had been consumed long since). Again the starry sky, now showing its Sierra multiplicity above the translucent fern fingers, and with it the pencil-thin sickle of the new moon and the Milky Way, which brought to mind her vanished daughter’s Arabic book: the figure of the “teacher” in the book had “the form of milk.” Ah, her vanished child: one could draw strength and resolution from the dying, but from the vanished …
The air that night was no longer still, but wafted, barely perceptible, past her temples. Nocturnal birds, far, far off, called—not owls, but bird calls such as she had never heard before, like those of crickets at a great height, and she could not get enough of them. What hurtled across the sky intermittently were showers, not of bright stars but of dark foliage, blown through her field of vision. This foliage created at least a transient horizon, and horizon meant: relief. (Loss of images meant: lacking a horizon. And at the same time this gave her a remarkable sense of filiation.)
Now and then, as if for a short journey in a sleeping car, she also fell asleep and dreamed, the same dream every time, in which she was walking through a ford, with shoes on, and the water was getting deeper and deeper, and then there was no more ford, and she lost her shoes, would have to appear in public barefoot.
Wasn’t that something like an image? So there was not a complete image blackout? Nonsense: the loss of the image and images had nothing to do with dream images. For it was not, or had long since ceased to be, dream images that refreshed existence and constituted the world, but rather almost exclusively those that came when one was wide awake, the matitudinal ones—or those had been the ones.
She woke up. The blackness of night still around her. But a morning breeze was already blowing. And then the notion came to her that she and her story could continue only if she spoke of her “guilt.” It was time to confess it, in detail, out loud, distinctly. But to whom? For she could not address her confession to the air or to a rock or to the human frog. Or could she? Why not tell the story to the underside of a fern frond, for instance? With impatience—which was rare in this woman to whom that expression from the Sierra, tener correa, hold your shoelace, meaning “Be patient!” applied nicely—she awaited the light that would herald the dawn.
There: the first fans, jagged like a lizard’s tail, and after a moment of grayness already greening, and on the underside of the delicate dwarf fern leaves the pattern of dot-shaped spore sacs, like the dots on dice, here two eyes, here five, here only one, many sixes! and, as was proper for dice eyes, nowhere more than that, never seven, eight, or more of the dots, though in some cases little fingers that lacked them altogether. All right: speak, tell your story.
And as she opened her mouth, she saw that all around her in the ferns other people were lying. They were in uniform. They were soldiers. And they were all asleep, as exhausted as one could possibly be. The one closest to her was even sleeping with his eyes half open.
And she promptly turned to him and told him, who, like his comrades, would have heard not a word, even if she had begun to shout, that during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, when her man went missing, she had wished that the child in her womb would die, or at least she had entertained the idea.
So? Hadn’t many parents, and perhaps mothers in particular, wanted for a moment to be rid of their children, or, at least—what was the expression—“entertained with approval” the thought of their going away? And did one not hear every day of mothers who had actually killed their children, not in the tradition of that sorceress in antiquity—to take revenge on their vanished father, who had abandoned her—but out of despair?
“Yes, but at the time of my death wish for my unborn child, I made up my mind to be successful and to become powerful,” she told the sound-asleep soldier, whom neither a Katyusha launching multiple rockets nor a Lincoln’s drum or whatever right by his ear would have awakened—maybe only a cry of pleasure, she thought involuntarily.
So? What was objectionable about success and power? “It was the kind of power and success,” she said. “I wanted to be a player on the world stage. And for a while I believed in that, and especially in the ability of an individual to make a difference in this day and age. And how easy it was to achieve the sort of success and power I acquired. But what was my success? A pattern without value. And my power? There was and is no more power, only the abuse thereof. In addition, my guilt was that I wanted to win. That I made a profession of my business of foreseeing, seeing what’s what, seeing clearly. That I wanted to show the world. That I wanted to conquer the world.”
Well? Why not? “Yes, why not? But not that way.”
Several versions have been narrated of the reasons or stimuli that got the victim of the loss of images back on her feet early that morning in the heart of the Sierra de Gredos and sent her on her way. Let the reader decide which of the reasons seem credible—perhaps less important—or sensible—perhaps more important—or so crazy that they, without being one or the other, are perhaps most important.
One of the versions went as follows: the heroine, and thus also her story, was able to move on as a result of admitting her guilt and betraying her secret (so according to plan).
The second: it was the voice. She could have spoken about anything—the main point was that she opened her mouth and spoke, even if only to herself—“for with the sound of her own voice she pulled herself out of the pit.”
A third version: it was the declaration of love, or whatever it was supposed to be, by that narrator who had intervened before, the narrator “from above,” which lit a fire under her and gave her new legs and arms, and so on.
A fourth or seventh version (the one appealing most to a certain reader, which would mean, however, that it is
because of him, the reader, and his particular ways?): the strength to get up resulted from a mistaken impression, when she first mistook an object in the fern hollow, or an animal, for instance a bird, for something else, then realized her mistake, and in observing the object in question, a robin, let us say, teetering on a fern frond above her and eyeing her and clearly not a wren and certainly not a hawk or a fern rat, saw the difference between the two objects, the one before her eyes and the one for which she had at first mistaken it: the adventurer of the loss of images derived the strength to get up and continue on her way, as this version has it, from the breeze of observation, which wafted toward her from the thing she was observing, as in the Arabic saying “The breath of mercy wafted hither from Yemen.”
And the last of the versions: neither the breeze of observation, nor the confession of guilt, nor her own voice after a long period of silence, nor … no, she owed her newfound ability to contract all the sinews of her body and leap to her feet to the morning wind: “It was the morning wind.”
What confusion again until she finally reached the path. First she crept on all fours, wriggled, crawled on her stomach like a seal, as if lacking arms and legs, slid sideways, clumsily, not in the least bit soldierly (the warriors whom she passed on her way out did not react in their sleep to being shoved aside; that was how deathly exhausted they were, sleeping so soundly that no snoring was to be heard).
While she was still pulling herself together, she had uttered a cry, no, a rattle, a stammer, consisting only of consonants. And now a barking, hoarse and grating, issued from the beautiful woman’s throat, followed by a grunting, as if from a creature wallowing in mud, a wolf ’s howling, as if not belonging to her, from beyond the horizon, an old man’s cough, a sound that combined mooing, baaing, and bleating, to which actual animal noises seemed to respond from the distance, here a jay’s squawking, there the fluting of a nightingale, there the whistling of a red kite, shriller than any referee’s whistle.
