Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And furthermore, her people did allow themselves the occasional luxury, but none that consisted of anything extra, or of imported ingredients. Every luxury came from substances extracted from the most hidden and, at the same time, magically fruitful — a natural magic, following the laws of nature — crevices and deposits in the area. These were the usual products and plants from such altitudes, as scarce and scanty as anywhere, items like juniper berries, bilberries, rowanberries, rose hips, acorns, Sierra olives, and so forth. Except that, because of the warming climate, the sun heated the rocks in such a way that, in all these fruits, in their classic miniature mountain forms, their pure essence was concentrated.

So there were no apples or grapes of the size found in the Garden of Eden or the Land of Canaan; but the few one could detect with the naked eye — for that reason alone they constituted a luxury, no, a treasure — were, whether added as garnish to ordinary meals or eaten separately, a whole meal in themselves, a delicacy, something for which the word delicatesse would be appropriate for once.

Altogether, the Hondareda depression was in reality less disadvantaged and inimical to life than one would have concluded from the name, and not only from first appearances. All the rounded granite boulders that had emerged from the thawing ice, hundreds and thousands of them, scattered hither and yon across the valley and up to the summit plain, polished to a high sheen, veined with sparkling white bands of quartz, reflecting each other many times over, especially now in the cold season, with the sun at an oblique angle all day, represented a system of natural solar collectors, by no means weak, and radiating heat even at night, which were used by the settlers — in the village and throughout the village, even the clumsiest and most awkward of them having become in the twinkling of an eye technical experts and engineers — to heat their dwelling niches, carved out of the cliffs, as well as their patchlike plantations, easily mistaken for rockslides, and the occasional greenhouses (mistaken by the observer for piles of debris, with half-broken panes of glass, sheets of corrugated tin, cardboard, and splintered window frames, beneath which, in his eyes, poisonous green, sulphur-yellow, and moldy gray weeds flourished).

To that extent her people, the handful there in the Pleasant Plantation, were indeed creatures of luxury, hiding, whether intentionally or not, under the cloak of being cast adrift in this region and wretchedly eking out an existence; that side of their being, too, which the reporter accurately characterized as a “reversion to hunting and gathering,” was part of the luxury, if only because of the rarity and — not only for that reason — deliciousness of the wild animals they bagged.

Which brought her back to the Hondarederos’ sense of taste, far surpassing all the other senses. Not once had a meal to which she had been bidden borne the slightest resemblance to gluttony or carousing. Rather, these few meals, rare in every sense, had consisted of tasting, sampling, nibbling; yet they had been as filling and thirst-quenching as any food and drink could be. In the same way that the new settlers had of their own accord become technicians, repairmen, and inventors, without training or study, simply in response to local conditions, so, too, taking the fruits of the area and ennobling them, they had, without lessons or planning, transformed themselves into culinary artists.

And these chefs consumed what they themselves had prepared with an enthusiasm experienced hardly anywhere else. They — and the guest in their company — inhaled their dishes. If there had been no devouring, even in the presence of intense hunger, it had nothing to do with “good manners”: devouring the items, yes, “items,” had been absolutely out of the question.

In their sense of taste, all feeling for being alive and surviving had been concentrated. And the other senses, those affected by their near deaths, had become concentrated (“No, gathered,” she to the author) in such tasting. Seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting, or, to put it differently, all sensitivities, had been drawn into these meals and had either regained their rhythm or, in the sense of touch, their function.

This manner of eating had helped heal and unify the senses, and further more had never become routine. — “Unified senses, sensuousness?” —That, too; but the unified senses had had an even stronger effect on the thinking of the immigrants of Hondareda — whose nickname among them had been La Mojada Honda (The Deep Mountain Pasture, The Deep Enclosure); not so much on their abstract thinking as on the way they considered and contemplated a specific thing or problem.

Every mealtime in the village had also been a time of contemplation — not an intensified but rather a heightened and elevated contemplation — where external and internal reflection had gone hand in hand, accompanied by a cheerfulness otherwise rare in those parts; the result being a likewise uncommon loquacity, a speaking in tongues very different from ordinary table conversation, more like the conversations of the mute with themselves, going in circles; thus also close to exuberance and pure, hearty nonsense — as was generally the case when, after spending time in a death zone, people regained the air of life, and with it, language.

The eating and drinking had had an effect on those confused folk and their jumbled senses, thoughts, and words, an effect similar to that which a certain kind of reading had on other survivors, a reading that was neither skimming nor poking around nor devouring, but a reflective tracing, in places also spelling out and deciphering, and if ultimately it was a form of consuming after all, it was a kind of inhaling, a breathing in (and out). Such meals represented time saved in two ways, much as reading did, and also rhythmic (recreational) walking.

Like those survivor-readers glancing into a book, the survivor-eaters there had been impelled by tasting to look up and raise their heads for contemplation, some for release from themselves, some for relaxation, some for excitement, and finally some for the pleasure of communicating and sharing — as among the previously mentioned readers out of the desire to read aloud or even to act on something they had long ago resolved to do, an action postponed almost past the time for it — which only now, with reading, with tasting, became possible and accessible — even if such an action, in the presence of food, just as in the presence of books, should express itself merely in a seemingly meaningless hug given to a random stranger.

The reporter presumably replied to her as follows: “The Deep Enclosure? The Pleasant Plantation? We outside observers have another name for the basin of Hondareda: The Dark Clearing. And this is no paradox or play on words now; I do not want you to have sawn off my ponytail in vain. The term ‘Dark Clearing’ actually stems from an observation shared by all who were dispatched here: as a result of the belt of trees planted around the bottom of the basin or arena, the area it encircles has taken on the character of a classic clearing, a clarière , a tschistina , a claro —the expressions in all languages have to do with brightness. But in Hondareda, darkness mixes in with the brightness that remains trapped in the light, smooth rocks and rock dwellings, evident each time one looks, a gloom specific to the place. Contrary to the assertion that they live in a clearing, darkness prevails there. The interior of the surrounding dense conifer forests is an opaque black. And this black does not remain confined to the forest. It is constantly reaching for the open area. True: the mountain sun, together with its reflection in the glacial lake and its more colorful, varied, warm reflection in the indeed wondrously smooth granite hilltops — you see, I am not merely an observer! — provides a heightened light to the circle of the settlement, light such as I have never encountered in any other clearing in the world.