Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

One could also believe the observer, and it was not a question of ill will on his part, when, in his reports, he described the people of Hondareda as regressing to a much earlier time, something already perceptible in their living conditions. For even she had felt during her first period there as if she had been transported back to the storm-wracked forest beyond the outskirts of her home riverport city. For, to greet her, one Hondaredero or another clambered out of a trough not unlike those left behind when the huge trees were uprooted. (In fact, not a few of those root hollows, as her neighbor’s son from the porter’s lodge had told her over the telephone, were now being used as sleeping places by the increasing numbers of homeless in the region, made habitable with cardboard boxes, blankets, and animal skins, also valuable carpets, with people climbing in and out through the gaps between the earth and the up-ended rootwork, now situated vertically; later he, too, would spend the night in such a hole, and perhaps more than once.)

The holes in both places resembled each other in that they had come about as a result of a sort of upheaval of the earth’s surface: there the centuries-old oaks, chestnuts, and cedars had left behind hollows deeper than graves and wider than bomb craters, while here it was the granite boulders, left standing upright in the scree and debris of the former glacier, as tall as trees and with a diameter of at least ten tree trunks, that had lost their footing, without any help from a storm, simply as a result of the gradual sinking of the subsoil and eventually their own top-heaviness.

But, no again, my dear observer, these pits, the hollows left by what had previously anchored all the stone trees of the glacial-chaos forest, now tipped in all directions, were by no means evidence of an attempt to slip away from any sort of present day.

It was not even a question of pits, at least not inhabited pits. These numerous additional hollows, almost completely sheltered from wind and weather, within the larger Hondareda depression, served rather as trenches, among other things for the storage of firewood and for heating-oil tanks, and above all for marking — though not, as the observer thought, for blocking and complicating — access to the actual living quarters, which in this fashion were initially shielded from view: as passageways, or outworks, or, if you prefer the term, “connectors.”

And only after these passageways or outworks — why had this remained a mystery to the nearsighted, farsighted, and also astigmatic observer up to now? — the actual dwelling, both fortuitous and constructed (with ancient as well as contemporary materials), as modest and prepossessing, as run-down and at the same time elegant, as its inhabitant, hailing from Hong Kong, Mexico City, Haifa, Freetown, Adelaide, or Santa Fe, let us say. — Did this mean that she was enthusiastic about Hondareda and those who had moved there? — “Yes.”—And therefore predisposed toward them? — “Enthusiastic does not mean predisposed.”—But didn’t enthusiasm threaten to run away with one? — “If it is enthusiasm, never.”—But didn’t it add something to the object that was not naturally part of it? — “If it is enthusiasm, always.”—And what did it add? What did it do?—

“Yes, it does something. It makes something. It creates something.”—But how could one regain one’s lost enthusiasm? How did it make a new beginning possible? — “It seems to me, it begins as a great pain often begins, but then works in the opposite way. Are you familiar with that? After a long period of being free of pain, you suddenly think of the absent pain, in your head, in your soul, in your heart, in your stomach, in your intestines. Completely free of pain, you think of pain, here and now, or merely think of the word and the possible site of pain — and the next night, or an hour later, or immediately after your thinking of the word, pain breaks out in you, in the very spot you were thinking of, and with great intensity, and you think you will die of it this very instant.

“And this is the way enthusiasm sets in, right? or returns, usually with thinking or becoming aware — not of pain, of course, but rather of an object that should actually be present, but, strange to say, is not. Long ago in the village, and not only then — let us say, in my fruit-stealing days, which are not over yet — often, very often the mere name of a fruit would come to me—‘apple,’ ‘wild plum,’ ‘cherry,’ or ‘quince’—with nothing of the sort far and wide, and why should there have been, and then a few steps or roads or farm paths farther on: there was the thing, the object, the tree of early apples, or the good Louise of Avranches, conjured up by the name, as it were; no, not as it were, and at any rate, simply thinking constantly of the names, the names, and again the names had put me on the trail of the apples, pears, quinces, plums.

“And so one day in Hondareda, for example, I thought about the word ‘children’: yes, where are the children here? Are there no children here? — and with the conscious thought, my asking, listening, and raising my head at the same time, they promptly revealed themselves, if at first only in a brief clattering of feet on the smooth, natural glacial rock surface, which echoed louder than any man-made paving — a clattering that had long since been in her ear but had been mistaken for hands clapping. And then the cries of infants from more and more rock huts. And then immediately, upon the repetition of the word, a screeching of many voices, seemingly unending, such as could come only from a school playground …

“And enthusiasm, at least enthusiasm for the objects, places, and living beings in the depression of Hondareda, meant that in each word or name that added something to those that were already there, pain was all the more certain to be present, a pain that exceeded my own and was inescapably bound up with the things there, the things here; see the expression for being dead that had soon established itself in the region, without prior discussion: ‘No longer being on earth.’ And this enthusiasm, which makes things appear, brings them to light, with or without the concomitant pain, is something you should insert into my story again and again! It should provide the accent, the accent of plenitude and at the same time of dearth — that certain accent that all the inhabitants of the Pedrada-Hondareda region actually have when they speak.” Thereupon the author: “As you do as well here.”

When the author in his spot in La Mancha (and mancha already meant “spot”), far from the world but not world-forsaken, set to work later on her, and his, book, several versions of her crossing the Sierra de Gredos had already reached his ears, and they all had to do with the sojourn of that roaming woman, andariega , in the Hondareda-Camarca region.

Although by nature, or for whatever reason, he was a gullible person, it seemed to him that what was “attested to” and “recounted”—such things were always particularly emphasized in the preambles — was not merely false but also falsified. For these falsifying narrators, who furthermore never identified themselves and claimed to “require anonymity as a shield against predictable acts of revenge,” were plainly intent, and this was revealed by their very first sentence, in the choice of words and even more in the grammar and sentence rhythm, on first selling their story and second maligning their subject, with the latter motive, at least in their opinion, the absolute prerequisite for the former.

But actually they were attempting, in content as well as in form, to accomplish something far worse than mere character assassination, which could have produced exactly the opposite effect on various people in the market they were targeting: the little folks of Hondareda had to be portrayed from A to Z, and from the first adjective to the last verb, as the new Gothamites, dragging sunlight in bushel baskets from outside into their windowless houses or cellar holes, and so on. By treating the life of these settlers, who had made their way to the mountain basin from all over the world, as the stuff of fables and legends, they meant to render it harmless and, yes, unreal.