Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Later another member of the observation team passed them, running as always, storming along and stamping straight through the underbrush and around the piles of dead branches that increased in number toward the ridge but did not slow him down: before he came into sight, a squeaking and squawking that was his panting. He must have noticed the two of them, the temporary pair, on the crest, but seemed not to recognize his colleague. And the vagabond of the mountains that this woman was, to judge by the rips in her clothes and her hair blowing in all directions, received the most cursory of glances from the cross-country runner, not merely a greetingless and malevolent glance but a death-dealing one, reinforced further by being tossed over his shoulder. And at the same time he stuck out his tongue — what a thick tongue — and fired through the air at her with both index fingers.

Yes, there were also people like him, whose mind could not be changed by a fairy-tale-like encounter, who, even when they ran into another person up here, far from the usual world with its hostilities, did not promptly forget the unpleasantness that had arisen between them simply by virtue of their being opposite types or genders, but rather, in this third location, face-to-face with the image of an enemy — of which he had at least one to three thousand lurking inside him — found these images confirmed; and if the two of them had spotted each other on Jupiter or Venus, in the remotest corner of the universe, as the only surviving human beings: as far as he was concerned, such a thing would have merely sealed his hatred and his irreconcilability.

And the story goes on to say that the mountain-crossing woman persisted in her silence, although with a constant, ever more lively display of facial expressions, which the observer followed as intently as if he were reading the longed-for words from her lips. She, too, was astonished. She, too, was amazed at what the other person had said.

Yet she was not astonished at the same things as he was. She was astonished, rather, to realize that if she were to speak now, she would have something to say about the mountain basin and its inhabitants that would not merely contradict his observations and explanations but would negate them entirely. This although the man had already been in the high Sierra for a whole year or even far longer, while she had been here only—

And again she was astonished: for it suddenly seemed to her, who had come to the region so recently, as if she had lived in Hondareda a good deal longer than the reporter. “Yes, the time there,” she remarked to the author much later, as if long, long afterward, “seems to me in retrospect like a piece, a thing, an object, a mass of material; something spread out, spatial; spacious.”

Not merely one phenomenon or another: from the outset, to her, the very rhythm in the Hondareda basin that carried, connected, and indeed first generated the phenomena and allowed them to appear was fundamentally contrary to that of the red-cheeked, red-haired man. And this rhythm had established itself, after the climb from Pedrada, when she first caught sight of the amazingly deep mountain basin, and of this settlement at the bottom and on the slopes that was entirely new to her, and it had provided the beat for the next phase in her one-woman expedition.

Precisely because of the depth of the cavity at her feet and the massive dimensions and extent of the granite depression, which quietly exploded all usual expectations, the individual features, both near and far, appeared as if through a lens that sharpened them and lent particular emphasis to their contours; and furthermore the contours thus emphasized revealed themselves to be in harmony with one another: in fact part and parcel of the special prevailing rhythm that manifested itself in a flash.

The scattered boulders, the dwellings, the hayricks, the lake (laguna), its outflow, the herds, the people, the entire high-altitude lowland instantaneously took on the appearance of a script, complete with links connecting the individual features or letters, and likewise spaces, paragraphs, or punctuation marks, but in a clearly organized and, at least to her, lovely regularity (see rhythm, above).

And also worth mentioning: that to her the writing looked Arabic, with the identical squiggles of the dwarf bushes everywhere, the repeated and often parallel loose ends, splits, similar curved fissures in cliff after cliff, the dots, points, waves, accents, breathing marks of lichens and mosses on the rock, an Arabic script that she also, involuntarily, “read” from right to left.

And the rhythm of the phenomena in the sprawl of Hondareda went approximately as follows: A swarm of wild doves rattled. A family of grouse ran, hustled, flitted. A snowflake fell. The sky was blue. A rock was a dinosaur egg. A gust of wind hissed. A cloud of dust was yellow. An old man had freckles. The pattern in the dried mud was pentagonal or hexagonal. My grandfather sang in the distance. A flint gave off a singed smell. In the conifer forest the light-colored cones glowed and were cone-shaped, and the raven that flew by was raven-black.

And continuing in the Hondareda rhythm: In the sheltered spots behind the hawthorns the sun shone summery-warm as in summer, and in the leafless rowan trees no birds were sitting, and the bunches of berries were shriveled, and in the middle of winter or fall or May the crickets began to chirp, and I let them wind up my heart anew, and the grass quivered, and a stick was snakeskin gray.

And in the glacial lagoon the water smoked where it was free of ice, and reflected, and the dark part in this reflection was the steep peak of the Almanzor, so steep that precisely this highest peak among the peaks of the Sierra was the only one without snow, and al-mansûr , yes, clear as day now, means “the place” in Arabic, and kathib means “dune,” and behind a stone fortification actually appeared, as if conjured up by the word, a dune, sand from weathered rock that had been blown there, yellow like the feet of bees, and another man was red-haired, and on a mountain acacia the thorns were pointed like sharks’ fins, and all joys and sorrows of the world were gathered in one place, and there was a grove of chestnut trees the size of a small orchard, distributed over two terraces, and a single leaf there was whistling, and a few burst fruit husks hung there, empty and showing off their spines, and I leaped over the stone wall and snatched the forgotten chestnuts from the ground, and from an overhanging ledge hung icicles.

And the smoke in the settlement smelled like the smoke in Tiflis, in Stavanger, and in Montana, and next to the Almanzor the mountain water now mirrored the façade of my office building at the confluence of the two rivers in my riverport city, and farther to the left there was a clattering in an oak gall, and in the black broom pods the seeds rattled, yes, rattled, and way over to the left, down at the end of the lines, stood bint , Arabic for “girl,” and another word for daughter was ibna , and someone actually was standing there, and everything was all right again, and nothing was all right again, and everything and nothing was again as it had been, and in a dormer window a candle was burning, and my brother tossed a hand grenade, and one was filled with bliss, with a desire to help, with helplessness, and with a general lostness and neediness, as never before and as always, and the flock of wild doves rustled, and the phoenix rose flaming from its ashes, and one was swept across the first threshold one happened upon, in the first house one happened upon on the floor of the basin.

Long ago, during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, with the child in her womb, when the child’s father, her one and only, had disappeared on the way into the mountains (a disappearing that was characteristic of his tribe?), and when the world before her, at her feet, had suddenly turned upside down, had been stood on its head and acted insane, she herself, in the face of that spectacle, had gone insane, not just almost, but from top to toe.