Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“Everywhere in today’s world, the borders have long since been eliminated. This regressive crew, however, has reintroduced all the old barriers in this crisis-ridden region. Not only against those of us coming from the outside, but also among themselves — another result of the loss of images: they have created the most dense network imaginable of not only old and ancient boundary lines but also previously unthought-of, inconceivable ones: actual ones in the form of thresholds, barriers, and beams, and likewise imaginary ones, which are often even more effective.

“Women, and men as well, go around shrouded and veiled, or do you think I merely have that impression? That it looks that way to me — but doesn’t that say something, too? Not only their houses are barred, off limits to people like us, as well as to their nearest neighbor, and besides completely out of sight; also around his garden — for there is no cramped cave and hut that lacks a large garden — every one of the resettlers has erected a wall made of clay, tarpaper, tin, manure, and the like, unless the beds and fruit trees are already shielded from prying eyes by the enormous boulders broken off from the cliffs or moved there. This wall is higher than any I have seen around a garden anywhere, as high as a prison wall.

“Even the graves are strictly separated from one another — during my time here, nine to thirteen of them have already been dug or hewn out of the granite: there is no such thing as community cemeteries; rather each planter unit or monad has its own grave, each clearly isolated from the other, miles away, somewhere way out in the mountain wastes.

“The living observe an equally strict distance: when two or three of them happened to come together, I hardly ever saw one of them as close as arm’s length or closer to his fellow resident, and it is even more frowned upon here to follow close behind someone, on his heels; and whereas, in a crowd, we contemporaries romp along freely next to each other, having often just eliminated the last barriers, in this desolate spot all it takes is for a second person to appear in a deserted area for me to feel I have no room to breathe!

“Borders upon borders here, one more grotesque than the next. And most grotesque of all is perhaps the fact that they communicate with each other primarily in writing, that is to say, in letters — orally or over the telephone only in the most extreme emergencies — otherwise that is frowned upon: if a person so much as addresses another person coming toward him, out of the blue, the others go out of their way to avoid him, and he is left standing there alone. Nothing happens here that does not involve drawing boundaries, putting things in bounds and out of bounds.

“Man is a stranger to man, and a stranger he must remain: that is one of the fundamental decrees in this loners’ corral. And so it goes in their crazy, upside-down world, wherever one turns: as a stateless person, each acts only on his own behalf, as if that were part and parcel of his loner’s consciousness, and at the same time, between one and three thousand consistent rules, norms, and unwritten authoritarian edicts have found their way into this loners’ outpost.

“Of late I even see a communal flag waving above the rocky crest in the middle of the glacial lake, which is just about the precise center of the Hondareda colony, although otherwise not a soul goes there, a flag with the peak of the Almanzor woven into it, and to the right and left of it, as the heraldic animals, the almost black, hardly spotted Almanzor salamander and, no, neither the red kite nor the Hispanic chamois, but the extraordinarily small Sierra hedgehog, which one might mistake for a silver thistle. Thistle or hedgehog? What can you make out at this distance? You have better eyes than I, who am myopic, farsighted, and astigmatic to boot.

“And although they are all intent on preserving a veritably mythic namelessness and nobodyness, bit by bit names have been adopted for the most nondescript places and wretched spots in their hardship post, official and mandatory names. And although they have beyond any doubt said goodbye forever, good night, and fare thee well to history, the present, and the light of logic, these names for the most part refer to time, light, reason, and presentness.

“A patch of meadow, for instance, with nothing but a few granite outcroppings and arching wild rose canes, is called, God only knows why, ‘The Meadow of Reason,’ ‘El Prado de la Razón’; a beaten track that zigzags among the randomly situated living cubes — not even a real path or walkway, a mere system of gaps, where time and again one must flatten oneself to slip through, almost labyrinthine — is called ‘Passage of Things to Come,’ ‘Passage de l’Avenir’; and the rocky island in the laguna? — ‘Corso of the Third Era,’ ‘Corso di Terzo Tempo,’ corso because it is approximately circular and level — but a corso on which the likes of us have never yet seen a single Hondaredero strolling? either in the evening or at any other time? let alone the entire population of the town, as would be the case on a normal corso ?

“Altogether, although these people have obviously left the great cities behind them, all their placeless and faceless urban features carry names like ‘Plaza …,’ ‘Avenida …,’ ‘Boulevard …,’ ‘Rambla …,’ ‘New Square,’ also ‘Esplanade …,’ ‘Promenade …,’ ‘Quai …,’ and the like.

“And I see the world most grotesquely turned upside down in a cult of dew in which my Hondarederos indulge — yes, you heard me right: dew, nadan, rosée, rocio —which, besides the wetness from the clear sky, is, here on the Iberian peninsula, also a lovely woman’s name, without doubt the most lovely.

“Just think: in their crazed eyes it is not a cult but a science: the science of dew, and they view themselves as the dew scientists of the Pleasant Plantation, located in the central massif of the Sierra de Gredos, like the nuclear or microchip or macro-hard scientists of Silicon or Micomicon or Peppermint Valley.

“What feeds their folly, to be sure, is the fact that in this mountain basin the dew falls more heavily than perhaps anywhere else, and that in the daytime sun, which does not dry it up but rather allows the dewdrops to flow into each other, the dew forms veritable torrents, brooks, and cataracts, falling with a strange softness and almost soundlessly over the smooth cliff walls — massive quantities of water from the merging of dewdrops, collecting in the natural basins created by the glacier on the granite floor of the valley, and also captured in specially installed ponds, from which the settlers draw the dew water directly or channel it through gutters and pipes, pipeline-like! to their houses.

“That they use it for drinking, washing, and cooking is actually almost a fine thing — after all, precisely in the mountains the rest of the water is contaminated by grazing animals, by airplanes, and in general, and thus unwholesome, even toxic; I, too, have grown used, over time, to drinking the special dewdrop liquid — I like the taste — and to washing with it every morning, even my hair, without shampoo, and how soft it comes out! but everything else they do with their dew up here already crosses the line of foolishness into the kingdom of fools — their dew-fools’ kingdom, which is also dangerous.

“Now listen to this: by now the entire region is dotted with dew wells, roofed over, fenced in, also strictly guarded, as are elsewhere drilling towers in the most productive oil fields. With the exception of a few pathetic little rock crystals, the entire Sierra de Gredos has almost no mineral resources, and accordingly the people here speak of their “air resources,” among which the dew is the primary one. They treat dew as their chief capital, and also intend, as I have observed, to exploit it commercially and market it.