Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

This is how the new arrival encountered the population of the hollow, though only at first, and briefly. A while later, a few eagles’ circles, mountain jackdaw flocks’ caws, under-ice chords from the half-frozen lake later, it became clear to her that a general and persistent recoiling, cringing, and shying away was typical of this place; not merely at the sight of her, or of outsiders (in the twinkling of an eye she was no longer viewed as such) but also at mere nothings — if the sudden shadow of a bird or a cloud overhead and an equally unexpected sound were nothings.

The noises in particular, also the most distant and tiny ones, which took on a ghostly, oversized presence down there in the huge stone amphitheater, leaping from cliff to cliff, exploding now on the left, now on the right, now in front, now in back of me, made me and the person next to me, my fellow hermit right around the corner, my neighbor in the next chaos-alley over, duck involuntarily or even throw myself flat on the ground or to one side.

The reporter commented that these behaviors stemmed from typical hearing damage, which affected not only the people in the Hondareda enclave but by now almost the entire earth’s population: this phenomenon could be observed nowadays wherever civilization’s noise no longer physically assailed people at its source but instead took on other forms, like phantom sounds, beyond the ordinary sounds, tones, and signals characteristic of civilization, and in these phantom forms jumped us from behind in precisely those places assumed to be isolated: in nature, in places without machines and devices and crowds, assaulting our organism more ruthlessly than the original racket in the inhabited hubs of our civilized planet.

“Take, for example, the solitary hiker, who thinks he has put behind him all the so-called curses of civilization, tramping, say, through a semidesert in Arizona or a full-fledged desert in Mongolia: a hissing of wind behind him, and he, his ears deceiving him, jumps to one side in confusion to avoid what he thinks is a horde of bicyclists descending on him — while at home on the city outskirts he would have calmly let real ones pedal past him. Then a chirping of crickets is heard all across the silent steppe, and he perceives it as the ticking of thousands of office clocks, more piercingly tormenting there than they ever were in his actual office. The softest bird’s peeping in a briar bush — and he hears it as a telephone ringing, so harsh, so deadly to daydreams, and so hostile that he has hardly ever heard its like in reality.

“So we can observe precisely in the — admittedly peaceable — sectarians of Hondareda that there is no escaping our civilization — and why would there be? That it catches up with anyone who flees it — and only then, in catching up with him, as a phantom, becomes the actual evil that he earlier merely imagined!”

She, on the other hand, saw in the Hondarederos neither refugees from the world nor victims of civilization. Both as far as they were concerned personally, and in the name of the story to be told here: they were survivors. They — with the exception of the young ones — had all, each alone and in his own way, crossed the valley of the shadow of death. They were all equally timid and tremulous, also those for whom the crossing had taken place quite long ago.

It was true that in their confrontations with strangers or even those with whom they had no connection, these people seemed reduced almost entirely to reactions or even naked reflexes. Yet in such reactions and reflexes, only the first and entirely superficial layer of the body or being of these survivors found expression. Below — behind? — beside? in the middle of? everywhere else, in body and soul, she, the interloper, sensed, as only in certain survivors, an enthusiasm, a joy in existence, and gratitude, if still concealed and not (yet) capable of being expressed freely.

How she sensed that? She herself was a survivor. And when their turn came, it took only a brief exchange of glances, after the initial head-tossing, for the “handful” of people down at the bottom of the valley, the core of the new settlers there, to recognize that she was one, too. And then they opened up to her, without further ado, though not collectively — Hondareda also lacked anything resembling a village square or any other sort of communal gathering place — but each one individually; each in his hideaway, which appeared to turn its back on his neighbor’s, and was also seemingly as different from it as possible, on purpose.

And did they expect her to open up to them as well? Until the departure of the strange woman, “a considerable time,” “a moon,” several moons, later, no one among the inhabitants of the Sierra summit-plain valley knew who she was. For the first time on her journey she went unrecognized. But there was nothing left to recognize, not the queen of finance, or the film star, or anyone else, given how she had been making her way across the land and the continent for so long now, without a profession, without status, without a role.

They did not want to know anything about her, either; no name, no family, no previous life, no loved ones, no mother or father tongue, no land of origin, no destination — each person’s dealings with her took place as if in the absence of all feeling — and rightly so — rightly so? “The only thing the various individuals of this strange tribe lacking all tribal organization” (the reporter’s expression), of this “tribe of hermits” (ibid.), and all of them, wanted to ask of the beautiful stranger, “whose beauty meant nothing to this neoprimeval horde” (ibid.), and the very first thing they said after coming to trust her, their fellow in experience, each in his own idiom, different from that of the person next door, was: Which route had she taken through the Sierra de Gredos, to bring her up here / down here to Hondareda — which, among them, was absolutely not to be called “Hondareda,” but rather, exclusively, and each time with a different pronunciation, “the Pleasant Plantation.”

She had then omitted not a single detail in her recounting of the journey; in particular the deviations and detours aroused enthusiasm in listener after listener, or, to use another term, their solidarity, and so from way station to way station she invented more and more details for them. How gullible these “planters in stony acres” (the observer) were when it came to anything that involved storytelling — all that was needed was the appropriate wind-up, the sentence structure, the tone of voice, and the rhythm, and each of them was all ears, and their lips parted in astonishment — even when the contents offered nothing at all to be astonished at. (“What do you consider human?” she asked the author, and his reply: “To ask you the right questions and in that way get you to tell stories.” In that way? Yes. And here his use of the intimate form of “you” was just right.)

This was how she also discovered that her listeners, like her, the storyteller, were survivors in a particular sense. Was she, who had once, quite emotionlessly, made major decisions affecting banks and the money market, also gullible? Yes, and always had been, since her village childhood. “You could tell her anything!” (“Me, too!”—the author’s exclamation.)

Beyond storytelling, however, when it came to other utterances and events: just as among the people in this place — if not a villager’s caginess, certainly a fundamental skepticism (“basic,” the author’s suggestion); a probing and testing, or an insuperable incredulity, impervious to the most logical argument.

And common, furthermore, to them and to her, who had wafted in, was clumsiness; a clumsiness that in her case, as well as that of the individuals here, broke out only after a series of noticeably skillful, no, noticeably graceful, actions and movements (dexterities, kinesthetic harmonies, gravity-defying shifts in equilibrium, dancing hither and yon through the air almost acrobatically), and interrupted these round-dance-like movements that were seemingly executed with the greatest of ease.