Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“I know: my Hondaredians will bottle the dew water in flasks, spray cans, tubes, canisters, barrels, in order to sell it and to become powerful through the dew business. I can prove that you fellows are poised to sell your dew not only as drinking water but also as medicines to treat all imaginable deficiencies and disorders, for external and internal use: dew products for acne, insect bites, snakebites, eye problems, cellulite, as well as for heart palpitations, colic, chronic fatigue, nightmares, loss of appetite, obesity, and, finally, even for melancholy, loneliness, fear of death, murderous impulses, schizophrenia, hopelessness, malaise, inability to love in all its manifestations, or, more precisely, forms of atrophy and wasting. Dew water boosts your libido! — that is the slogan they plan to launch. And another: Dew from the Sierra de Gredos: the secret of a radiant skin!

“With a view to such a market, which you intend, not without justified optimism, to expand step by step into a worldwide market, you plan to manufacture your dew products in solid form as well, as powder, pastilles, pills, buffered with atomized mountain fruits, such as juniper berry, rowanberry, moss berry, and so on. If one of you actually happens to be a dew scientist, I must tell you that to me this science is by no means pure anymore — dew, schmew: as the scientist conducts his dew research in apparent innocence, examining the dew under a microscope, mixing it, assaying reactions, he has his eye fixed firmly on profits and a monopoly.

“I have obtained copies of all of your scientific papers, most of them lengthy and seemingly tedious, on topics such as ‘The Form of Dewdrops on Grasses in Contrast to Dew Formations on Stones, Sand, Gravel, and Glass,’ ‘Multiplicated Accumulation of Dew on Smooth Granite Surfaces as a Result of Increased Nocturnal Solar Radiation in the Mountains,’ ‘The Dew Sphere as Collecting Lens for the Color Spectrum,’ ‘Erroneous Flights of Sierra Moths to the Dew Meadows, or Simulation of Mating Invitations by Dew Glitter,’ ‘Varying Dew Phenomena on Oak Leaves, Larch Needles, Bird Feathers — in Particular on Jackdaws, Mountain Cocks, and Peregrine Falcons — and Further on Wild-Boar Bristles, Human Hair, and Animal Pelts, with Particular Attention to So-Called Dew-Licks and Dew-Spirals on Cows, Goats, and Sheepdogs,’ ‘The Riddle of Black Dew: An Attempt at an Explanation’: but not one of these dew deliriums did not have thrumming in the background your insane notion of achieving fame and fortune by means of this natural resource.

“Without a doubt it will be proved that you are seriously considering establishing a dew mafia and then using typical mafia methods to found a human-rights-flouting despotic state among the universal-rights states that have finally cleaned up their act since the last century. From economic to political power, and from political power to the new religion that you will impose on the rest of the world, as I need not demonstrate because it is the logical outcome.

“By now you already worship dew as your idol. I was not mistaken when I heard each of you singly, but all of you in exactly the same words, intoning veritable dew litanies: ‘O dew of the new moon! O dew of the solstice! O dew on the mountain apple! O dew in my shoes! O dew on my mother’s headstone! O dew that I drank from the lips of my beloved! O dew in the night as I lay dying! O dew on the cellophane from the crushed cigarette pack! O dew, my eyebrow pencil and my moisturizer! O dew that in the expressions of lands all over the earth maketh the meat, the vegetables, the wheat kernels, and the fruit soft and tender as only thou canst! O dew, by definition the fruit of the reflected rays of our earth! O dew, atom of truth and beauty! O dew of the night of pain and suffering! O dew of the hour of awakening! O dew on the eyelids of the white angel! O dew in the child’s cowlick! O dew on the pencil point! O dew on the blood spot! O puddle of dew, in which the sky with its jet contrails is mirrored! O dew that sprayeth in the colors of the rainbow and turneth a somersault when the ball rolls through the dewy grass! O dark crisscrossing trails in the dew of the savannah where the wild beasts have trod! O drop of dew, measure of measures! O dewdrop, fullness of being and of our brief sojourn in these parts, and not only in the hours of morning!’

“And I will testify that you have developed an entire creation story or cosmogony that has its origin in dew: no big bang or whatever at some point or wherever — rather, the silent multiplication into infinitude of one dewdrop! Already, before you read a book, you first leave it out in the dew, open to the page you will be reading. And already I can observe how for you people dew literally functions as the measure of measures, as the basic standard. Instead of the basic metric: the basic dew.

“Every second word you utter is ‘dew’! Instead of ‘money,’ ‘dollar,’ ‘mark,’ ‘peseta,’ ‘real,’ ‘maravedi’: dew. Instead of ‘a kilometer from here,’ I hear ‘three dew fields from here,’ and you also calculate time according to the dew: instead of ‘after a night,’ ‘after a dewfall.’ Where others write or calculate in the air, you write in the dew — on an outdoor table, on a tree trunk, on a car’s fender. Where others sniff gasoline or drugs or other substances, you dew-fools sniff dew. Where elsewhere storms measure eight to eleven and earthquakes measure seven to ten, you measure Dew Strength One Hundred, using the dew gauge. And when I bring up all these things to you dangerous dew-fools, you look at me as though I were the fool.

“And you thereby embody beyond any doubt that divine utterance that hits the fool nail on the fool head, my dear Hondarederos and Hondarederitos and Hondaredians: you see the mote in your neighbor’s eye, but the beam in your own eye, as thick as a tree, you do not see, no, no, no!”

Thus the reporter standing on the ledge in the middle of the wilderness continued to speak for a long time. It was as if the dew, or the word, or speaking of the dew in the Hondareda region, had loosened his tongue — or several different tongues at once. His speaking sparkled with enthusiasm, independent of what he was saying. Had he not earlier, in time out of mind, been one of those classic enthusiasts who are supposed to figure prominently in our story?

And now, in this remote locale, far from his observer’s routine, in the presence of the woman, the stranger whose identity he had no desire to know, nor where she came from, nor where she was going — it was enough to be standing there with her — his former enthusiasm had caught up with him again, at last. He had flushed cheeks like an adolescent, and now and then he began to stammer, like one who for the first time in his life begins to say what he has long dreamed of saying.

Except that he also jumbled things up quite a bit. Did not enthusiasm have to be accompanied by clarity, the ability to make distinctions, and, if grounded in criticism, in self-criticism above all? On the other hand: didn’t such speaking, although this and that might be far-fetched, pulled out of the air, tossed out to test the waters, as people used to say, create a reality, which, unlike a merely observed and registered reality, simply through the rhythm of the speaking, suggested — narrated — proposed, a possible alternative world?

And the reporter, speaking so heatedly that despite the cold up here in the Sierra his astigmatic’s glasses fogged up, was astonished by, amazed at, all the things that enthusiasm made possible in the way of words and sentences, if one just let it have its way, parallel to the facts and the tangibles. And she, the stranger, the adventurer, or whatever she was? She remained silent.

The story tells us that she remained silent long after he had finished speaking and was waiting expectantly for her reply. A troop of chamois, no, a veritable herd, gazelle-like, filed past between the two of them, the younger animals leaping, and trotted down the steepest part of the ledge as if on a level surface tipped up vertically.