Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

For years she had denied it, she finally admitted, almost inaudibly, to the author, had denied it energetically and determinedly, and this energy had then been partly responsible for her “worldwide success”—a criminal energy, so to speak (no, not so to speak).

“Everyone has his own madness inside him,” she dictated later, when she had recovered her voice, to the author, “and this madness has already come to the surface once, or several times. Except that we all behave, or most of us do, as if nothing had been wrong.”

Now, however, at the sight of the depression of Hondareda, with its unexpected new settlement, which upon one’s approach looked positively urban, indeed metropolitan, head-down in the glacier-clear valley, a city as if under a glass bell, or altogether as if in a different, as yet unexplored and even undiscovered element, a scene replayed itself in her mind, one of the last before the somewhat happy ending of that film whose heroine she had portrayed long ago: fleeing from her mortal enemies, she found herself in an utterly dead landscape with nothing but volcanic ash, some of it still smoldering, at the edge of the world — as everywhere, such ends, edges, and precipices of the world could occur practically cheek by jowl with the apparent middles and centers — and she wandered, abandoned, half-blind, empty-handed, pleading to the invisible heavens, calling for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her homeland, cursing her fate and human existence altogether, through the scree and fallen rock, stumbled, fell, struggled to her feet, fell again, and finally remained lying facedown on the ground. The camera showed her in close-up, prostrate. Sparks of what looked like lava shot nightward past the figure lying stretched out there, in a coma or dead. A temporal leap. A change of lighting, with the close-up unaltered. The searchlights of the pursuers? No, daylight. The end of night. During the temporal leap, day had broken. Her head still in the smoking volcanic ash and basalt. Over? The end?

Yet gradually some movement, or is it merely the wind in the hair of the corpse? Slowly her head rises and is bathed in light, morning light. Her skin, also her brow, and especially her temples seem made for this light. (Of course the lighting man has done his part, with additional spots and reflectors on the sides and especially on the ground.)

The eyes opening: black, which at the beginning of the shot looks just as dull and veiled as the cratered landscape all around, but then begins to glow, and now, as the camera slowly pulls back, almost imperceptibly, from a close-up to a full shot, here and there the glassy humps of basalt also begin to glow, the fiery cataracts of all the long-ago volcanic eruptions now chilled, hardened like crystal, and heaped up in the wasteland of petrified ash.

It is a rather dark glow, almost scornful, or even, with all the hopelessness concentrated in her gaze, full of quiet rage, unlike her futile fleeing of the previous night, with hands and feet groping and tapping pointlessly in every direction. Then — although the camera remains focused for a full shot, I seem to recall seeing as a moviegoer a shot of only her mouth, just for a moment: the lips parting. Astonishment. Yes, astonishment. Not to be forgotten: her film was set in the Middle Ages, and the occasional astonishment expressed by the characters was not merely believable but was a basic trait. This astonishment of hers, however, exceeded the customary medieval astonishment, was an astonishment at nothing, nothing at all, and it was decisive.

For it saved her life. More than that: it gave her the strength to start a new life. That decisive astonishment in the moment of awakening after a night of despair enabled her to shake off her old story once and for all, and made room for a new scenario, one that was not merely a thousand times but infinitely more beautiful and true, and this story was now about to begin. (Except that the film did not show what happened next.)

At the time, several interpretations were put forward to explain that “decisive astonishment” on the part of the heroine: a dream, a predawn dream, of the sort that sometimes plays out in heavenly colors and tones? the light of morning shortly before sunrise, and the sky, again very medieval, as the domed firmament, and the lava earth, on which the woman lay outstretched, as the surface over which it arched? Or a prematitudinal dream of Paradise and the light and the air currents of the real or waking world intermingling with it?

For my part, I believe that the fresh astonishment of that persecuted and despairing woman there was actually unfounded, or stemmed from almost nothing — just as I, too, from early on and to this day, though less often, and less and less frequently, in my often damnably askew and sometimes accursedly worthless life, occasionally see, newly astonished and astonished anew, an immense, powerful, unshakably peaceful world flash by, which I cannot be dissuaded from considering the actual one — more will be said here later about the rather despised word “actual”—and such a world never appears to me in the form of the sun or of pure light, but only in rather dim, flickering, twilight-gray flashes resembling distant heat lightning, as the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous: for instance as a rusted nail seen years earlier on a dusty road in the place of my birth; as a curb seen one time on the Peloponnesus; as the shadow of a child in Oklahoma; as the boat gangplanks in Cappadocia. And I, too — and with me my “actual world”—are threatened with the loss of images, or has it already taken place, irreversibly? And since it is a question of my life, and not of a film plot, my astonishment was also never able to play a decisive role.

Her first experience of the surprisingly populated mountain depression matched to a T the way her eyes had been opened to the world in the scene she had played at the end of her film. The world one experienced in Hondareda was virginal and bridal, yet equally, as one sensed the first time one gazed down into that camp in the hollow, a lost cause, or perhaps not? (For this sentence she again insisted on “one,” and when the author, who had long since left his father- and motherland for his village in La Mancha, hesitantly asked whether “bridal” and “virginal” were terms still used in German and suitable, she told him that what mattered was the adjectives’ relationship to the nouns, and in this case: yes!)

By the way, she said, her story would have to return later to that upside-down hour, with the outbreak of insanity, that had occurred during her first journey through the Sierra de Gredos; for that had also become the hour of her guilt, and the fact that now, on this last, or perhaps not last? crossing, she had made up her mind, and, in the worst moments, intensely imagined, that she would speak of it at long last, had kept her from giving up and just letting herself fall, or perhaps not?

On her previous adventurous journeys, she had encountered that virginal world not so infrequently — and again she interrupted the author and ordered him occasionally to replace “adventure” and “journey” with “roaming.” Almost every time it manifested itself, it had been when the roamer, or, in Spanish, la andariega or andarina , from andar, “to walk,” had stretched out somewhere in the open and fallen asleep, just as had happened in the film with the heroine she had played.

Unlike in the film, she slept there, on the bank of a brook, in the steppe grass, under an overhanging cliff, only very briefly, usually for just a few breaths. And the falling asleep occurred in broad daylight. And it was never preceded by sorrow or despair, at most by a certain weariness from walking, a listlessness.

Awakening from such a slumber, always accompanied by the rushing of water, the whistling of wind, and several times the more or less distant roar of a highway: not an easy awakening: as if poked by the forehead of an animal watching over her or some friendly creature. And also each time a scenery that, although unchanged, now seemed thoroughly unfamiliar and above all incomprehensible, without north and south, noon and afternoon — if any time, then morning, if any land, a land in the Orient.