Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

What freshness wafted toward one from this indecipherable setting. Except that it soon gave way to the tried-and-true familiar, and already the rejuvenation and the brideliness were wilted and dissipated. But in her Hondareda period this was not the case. She had never experienced anything similar.

But then something comparable did come to mind. As a young woman she had often taken the train from her university town home to see her grandparents and her brother, still quite little, in the Sorbian-Arab village. Although the village lay in an almost flat landscape, before arriving at the railroad station, located a short distance from the village, the train went through a real tunnel. That got one’s attention, and not only the first time but every time, and even more remarkable was the length of the tunnel. Each time it seemed as though it would never end. What a long journey, with darkness to right and left, and in a tunnel on almost level terrain, too!

When she traveled home this way, it was always evening already, if not night. And often she was tired, from being in the city or just in general. And as time went by, she would fall asleep in the tunnel, more and more often, and eventually every single time. And she fell asleep there even when she was not tired. The train had hardly entered the tunnel, at which it always more than doubled its speed, and its rattling and banging turned into a high-pitched whirring and whining, when her eyes would close and she, her body and her consciousness, and everything and everyone in the car with her, would drift along, while the iron wheels and rails took on a stronger and seemingly hardened rhythm between the very narrow tunnel walls, deep in the wide, hollowed-out belly of the dugout of the grander time. And: in the tunnel one man raped her. One? One for all.

At the end of the tunnel, with the train’s sound now more distant again and softer, while the train slowed before reaching the station, she awoke. And every time, and with every repetition of the trip just as powerfully as in a fairy tale, she had the transformed-world experience. And unlike the times when she awoke as a vagabond with the sky above her, the awakening in and after the tunnel was lasting and reliable and above all valid. As a result of the tunnel, momentary, everyday experience, the mere present, was transformed and elevated into something of epic proportions. When one’s eyes closed in the tunnel, one saw afterward with much bigger eyes.

And just as later, when she was in upside-down, downside-up Hondareda, surrounded by the summit plain of the Sierra walls, she had thought back then, at the sight of the entirely unadorned village, which, however, seemed after her tunnel sleep to be decked out as for a festival: “What has-beens, how superfluous we are. How played-out we are. What dream merchants and castle-in-the-air-builders we are. How lonely and lost we are.”

And just as after the tunnel sleep her former home had seemed incomprehensible, so the Hondareda world seemed incomprehensible to her now, and from beginning to end: which did not mean that she was looking to comprehend it. For, just as when she awoke under the open sky after the tunnel, this not-comprehending-anymore was basically invigorating, and despite all one’s awareness of being a lost soul among lost souls, it gave one confidence, of a very strange sort. What? Was she, the boss, a lost soul? That, too, the story will touch upon later. And besides, she had long ago ceased to be a boss. Or perhaps not? Or all the more?

There was almost nothing ordinary about the “mead of Hondareda,” one of the names as numerous as flower petals that had been coined for the glacial basin. So she stood there, and stands there, and will have stood there, one day looking at a sundial painted on a granite slab. It was not merely that it had no hands, and behind the shadow-dial nothing but a landscape in circular form, a miniature of the region: the sundial was located at a spot in the settlement that the sun seldom reached, and then only for moments, and besides, a granite cliff stood in the way of the sun’s rays: so that the sundial’s indicator cast its time-revealing shadow at most for a couple of moments.

Similarly, right after her arrival there, beneath the mountain-blue sky, the zenith of whose great dome already hinted stormily at outer-space black, she had again been pelted, as earlier in Pedrada, from a broom thicket: except that this time, instead of stones it was almost weightless juniper berries, and, after another stretch, shiny red rose hips, not even as big as quail eggs, and, after a few more boulders, Sierra nuts, elderberries, and pine nuts. And it was not so much that she was pelted with these things but rather that they were thrown to her by persons who kept out of sight, in a high arc, as if she were supposed to catch them (which she then did).

Likewise a brand-new, shiny bulldozer was suddenly parked there, surrounded by quartz and alabaster cliffs so smooth that one’s hand could not gain a purchase. And on another day, somewhere else entirely, far from the settlement, from the grainlike tall steppe grass, among which actual blades of wheat could be found, emerged freshly sieved sand cones as high as houses, in each one a weather-beaten rusty shovel, as if left there long ago. And the first, or third, or last of the original inhabitants of Hondareda — the observer had observed correctly — a man visibly stricken with years, was busy day in, day out, transporting boards on a small ladder wagon, back and forth, forth and back, sometimes also in a circle, without unloading them anywhere.

Another Hondareda person clambered into the one crane in the place, which towered above all the rock spires on the floor of the basin, and stayed up there, motionless, in his cabin, sitting below the still arm of the crane, reading? watching? finally fumbling around, doing things with his hands that had no connection with the lifting apparatus, something like shaking a skillet, something like threading a needle, something like writing, with his nose close to the paper like a first-grader — writing with his entire hand, his fist, meanwhile rolling his shoulders, throwing his head back, swaying his torso, and thus involving his entire body, or was this actually lovemaking, with his “partner” shielded by the cabin’s screen, and look, now he is gazing quietly out his crane window again, not moving a muscle, look how far away he is, and how, at fingertip distance, his iris iridesces and his pupils pulsate.

And one day or night, or again and again, the roamer in the temporary Sierra capital must have pushed open one of the seemingly unoccupied wooden shacks, pushed aside the partition, and seen two lovers there, more real or in the flesh than anything one could imagine: there lay two people, very young, and the girl, the woman, was the most visible.

She did not react in the slightest to the intruder, who in fact immediately took one step backward, but then became a spectator, wordlessly asked and invited to do so by the woman. As glistening as the girl lying there naked was (where in the world was the source of light in the dim shack?), the epitome of pride and surrender in flesh and blood, but especially in flesh, she seemed even prouder when she knew herself observed, and her surrender, becoming hard to define, transcending the person to which it pertained, the boy or man, appeared to be not merely somewhat but infinitely greater and more self-aware — will have appeared thus, appears thus.

Enough of myths, this gaze said, this skin and this hair: enough of myths in which male gods descend on the woman in the shape of a cloud, a swan, a bull, a dragon, a billy goat, and the like; look at me: entirely different myths are in effect, and not only here and now, myths in which longing during absence and fulfillment during presence finally coalesce, and these myths are not made up out of whole cloth! A knothole in the shack opened into a spiral, and through the wide-open door the summit plain of the Sierra, peak after peak, the Mira, the Little Brothers, Los Hermanitos, the Little Knives, Los Cuchilleros, the Three Galayos, the Almanzor, the Galana, came riding in, one after the other. What were the two doing there? Was this even lovemaking? And the observer again understood nothing, nothing at all: and that was as it should be. Whatever the case: those two in the shack, copulating in such a creaturely way, majestically, displayed it to the world; displayed it to the universe.