Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And the other person, too, that was certain, had the same impulse in the first moment, was conflicted as he was: Jumping for joy or (a play on words) about to jump into a life-or-death duel?

And nonetheless, during that conversation on the stone outcropping, with both of them just playing at arguing, his amazement when in the part quoted above (“When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”) the mountain vagabond seized him, the official outside observer, by his ponytail — some of his colleagues on the team also wore their hair tied back this way — and hacked it off, lickety-split, with her pocketknife and tossed it into the stony waste.

And it is this action by which he recognizes the woman: she was the one who gave him a kick the previous evening, or a few weeks ago, or when had that been? Except that now this cutting of his hair is no hostile act. What is it? “A new ritual? A new image?” And in this spirit the two of them will continue for a while to discuss the nature of images and the loss of images.

But we have not yet reached that point. One thing at a time — the episode or way station described just now was a case of our getting ahead of ourselves: first the story must deal more thoroughly with the wanderer and her encounter with the people in the pit of Hondareda up by the summit plain.

She stayed in Hondareda, as it turned out, longer than more or less planned, consistent with a favorite greeting in the colony: “Let it be a surprise!”

How long? For hours? days? Time played no part in these events, or at least not the usual part. Just as the customary categories of place and space continued to exist but hardly applied to what took place, the hours, minutes, seconds, and such were, if not inoperative, at least units of measurement best left out of consideration during this particular period, and whenever they nonetheless popped up in the story, they proved disruptive and unnecessarily sobering.

Time did continue to have an influence in this highest inhabited spot in the Sierra, but its units were less calibrated to, and measurable by, any clock rhythms from the outside world.

Entirely different units of time were in effect during the Hondareda episode, units lacking a beat, as it were, powerfully concentrated, condensed, and yet prolonged, oscillating and, for that reason, even without the usual tick-tock, by no means less regular, continuing on and on.

When normal clock times sneaked in among these temporal spaces so different from the ones we customarily traverse (“sneaked”? yes)—“for just a second,” “two minutes later,” etc. — they weakened the temporal magic, which, according to the reporter, was “in any case questionable,” but, in the view of the woman who had commissioned this story, reinforced the realness and the nowness and gave the story fresh impetus. In contrast to the measures of distance that had spontaneously come into use in the hollow, units of measure from long ago as well as newly minted ones—“a stone’s throw away,” “at the distance of an ibex’s leap,” “at telescopic distance,” etc., — for the temporal units now in force no particular terms offered themselves; for instance, not “in a dozing-off moment,” or “after a second dream-night,” for it was not a question of a dream.

At most they might refer to “a wind-gust later” or “after another hammer blow” or “before the next page-turning,” or use a now clichéd expression, which, however, had acquired meaning again in Hondareda time, “in a jiffy” or “after a while.”

The time in effect during her crossing of the valley perhaps revealed itself to be most clearly distinct from chronometricized standard time — yet no less normal or natural? — in that she, lingering along the way, also walking in a circle, as if getting lost on purpose, later described it to the author not with the usual “then … and then … and then …,” but rather “and so on … and on … and on …”

In her eyes, a connection existed between those local time measurements, which eschewed any kind of precision, and the fact, “yes, the fact,” that the inhabitants of the Hondareda colony, in another regression? preferred to have their money, to the extent that any was in circulation among them, in the most archaic forms or incarnations possible, or in seemingly impossible shapes, such as lumps of rock crystal, or, preferably, sheets of mica, or, better still, clumps of droppings from the Sierra chamois, or, absolutely the best, hazelnuts — anyone who paid with empty shells was a counterfeiter! — and dried chestnuts, and the further fact that in the colony the units of weights and measures recognized the world over, the gram, hundredweight, ounce, pud, and ton, had not merely been eliminated but were also frowned upon, and this although the new settlers had arrived only recently and amid the confusion were busy setting up temporary housekeeping arrangements.

Anyone who slipped up and said that “in two hours” he had collected “ten liters of cranberries” or “twenty pounds of bovists in half an hour” or shot a “wild boar weighing half a ton” or had already harvested from his greenhouse “two hundredweight of potatoes, four bushels of barley, an ounce of tobacco, and eight grams of saffron” was punished with scorn.

In the depression, the only measures of quantity that counted — according to a law, unwritten, like all the others there (see “atavism”) — were ones such as “a handful,” “two palmsful,” “a bent armful,” “all pockets full,” “a back full,” and the like; although founded only a short time ago, the colony was already well stocked with customs and a sort of common law.

And the observer called this “simple and childish”; see currency transactions, see units of measure. He also asserted that Hondareda was less a “colony” than a “camp,” self-imposed and voluntary, an arrogant one. She understood the man (without particularly acknowledging that he was right — which he also did not expect, for he assumed in any case that he was).

How strange at least the inmates of that high-altitude depression could appear when looked at in a certain way and from a certain angle. Weren’t they in fact prisoners, of themselves or whomever, or refugees who had not adjusted to their refugee existence in the slightest; still acutely in flight with every step they took up here, where they were seemingly safe, or maybe not? So in contrast to their descendants, those young people up on the bright, rocky slopes, who had perhaps not been old enough to remember much of the flight, and crossed paths with the strange woman without suspicion, enjoying complete peace of mind, as she made her way to the settlement at the bottom, passing through the chaos boulders, the members of the older generations, who seemed to be in detention there, almost all shied away in alarm.

What had looked from a distance, from the valley’s upper rim, like people waving to her: wasn’t it rather a communal shooing-away, in unison, so to speak, of the intruder? The people of Hondareda recoiled, each in his own place, at the appearance of this unknown person among the inhabited blocks of stone, as from an enemy, who, having pursued them here from the place they had fled, was threatening their lives; the people of Hondareda existed in a permanent state of war, if not in their conscious minds or their unconscious, at least on the surface of their bodies, in their nerves, their skin, and their hair; and the enemy, even in the singular, like this woman now, had a crushing power advantage over them, just like the enemy from an earlier time and a great distance away; even when armed, all they could do when face-to-face with this enemy was cringe defenselessly and squeeze their eyes shut — pretend to be blind, as they had done from time immemorial, as if that made them invisible.