Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Jakob Lebel returned her gaze. Ah, to embrace her on the spot. But hadn’t that already happened, when she let herself be seen this way and he saw her this way? And her hand, which she held in front of her, bent upward, not cramped but loose, like a bowl, showing there, too, neediness. Ah, to take this hand. But hadn’t that already happened? That her hand let itself be seen this way was sufficient for him.

The light, too, the last of the day, added to the effect, a glow, the “alpenglow”? no, the Sierra glow, the glowing of the Sierra de Gredos, of the granite peaks far to the south — what kind of glow? go there and see for yourself.

“I must go,” the adventurer said with that smile she had smiled every time she used the word “must.” He debated for a moment whether he should give her his copy of the “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos” as a parting gift, but it was obvious that she did not want any advice for the journey.

He, too, had to go (without a smile, even inwardly). On this night he would not, this once at least, board the helicopter, but would stay in Hondareda, would stride decisively over someone’s threshold, going from one connector to another into the house proper. A wind arose, a wind from the south, a mild one, and the German word for gust, Windsbraut , bride of the wind, occurred spontaneously to Jakob Lebel as the two of them parted and he turned once more to watch her as she began to climb. How glad he would have been to go with her, as her page, her escudero .

The dew had already fallen and collected in a rocky basin, forming a little pool, and he moistened his temples with it. He had always been at the head of his class, in elementary school, then in high school and at the university, and now also on his team, yet he had never found his place, and would never find it?

And what was she doing and thinking in the meantime, the woman? Now, very close, a stone’s throw, from the Sierra ridge, she jingled something in her pockets, but it was not coins but hazelnuts, chestnuts, juniper berries, and who knows what else. And if she was thinking anything, perhaps it was something along the lines of the words to be found in the orchardist’s text that her brother had used during his training at vocational school, on the variety of apple called “Jakob Lebel”: “On its sun-facing side, Jakob Lebel is checkered and spotted … in the cellar its skin becomes waxy … slightly sour taste, without aroma … bears even at high, cold elevations … naturally lacks a straight habit of growth and must therefore be pruned frequently …. Back in the day when I was a fruit thief, the apples known as Jakob Lebel were my favorites. Jakob Lebel, you are not yet sufficiently lost …”

The last mountain crickets chirped, up above and down below. And upon hearing them, Jakob Lebel recalled that, after all, there was a kind of plan for the day in Hondareda, repeated time and again, and it went: “Go out and listen to the crickets!” And he wished that the crickets, with their incredibly tender voices, might perform for his burial here. Did he want to die, then, here in Hondareda? Yes. But first he wanted to live here.

“Jakob Lebel”? That simply could not be the name of an enemy.

No doubt she, too, looked back at the hummock on which she had been standing only a short while ago, and at Hondareda, or Hondoneda, down below. Sometimes, when one stepped out of a house or a pub onto the street and looked in through a window at the place one had just left, didn’t one feel surprised at no longer seeing oneself inside, sitting at the table or wherever one had been a few seconds earlier, reading, writing, talking to someone, and might that not give rise to a hallucination — of oneself?

This is what the woman experienced as she set out and glanced over her shoulder at the now vacant rocky mound, and this is how she later described it to the author. The hallucination, the residual image, of herself was so compelling that her astonishment was accompanied by shock. She recoiled at the flickering silhouette there, as if that “Me!” were something sinister, or rather something that made one shudder, not the way one would shudder at a ghost or some other alarming phantom, a menacing one: Didn’t this recoiling, followed by pausing and doing a double take, also make one stronger? (Like her brother, she was both brave and easily startled, and there was the family legend that this propensity for being startled went back to that night when they were still children and someone came dashing into the house with the news that their parents and their other brother had died in an accident.)

And Hondareda in the glacial trough? As she looked down, it seemed at first not even to exist anymore, and for this verb “to seem,” according to the author in La Mancha, the Spanish term traslucir, or “shine through,” would probably have been wrong: for all that showed of the Dark Clearing was the darkness, a black hole in the middle of the otherwise brightly dusky high Sierra.

But then the labyrinthine settlement appeared all the more distinct in the darkness, with a more intense glittering of the mica, a glowing of the veins of quartz, a shimmering of the lichen: the latter, coating the cliffs as well as the rocky roofs throughout the basin with a yellowish-greenish-grayish film, made the town look like a city of millions, like Shanghai or São Paulo, photographed from a satellite halfway between the earth and the moon.

But to the same backward glance how small our Hondareda looked, and then, as she walked backward, how it gradually shrank still more. And at the same time a roar rose from the former ice basin, a roar such as might have come from a normally quiet area that was flooded in all directions as far as the horizon, the roar coming from the bottom of a river, still coursing along its channel even as it spilled over its banks, “the roar of the Mississippi.” And in the roar one could also make out a kind of buzzing, which brought to mind the many newly installed apiaries on those slopes that were bathed in sunshine at almost all times of day — nowhere was the sun warmer and more constant than up here in the mountains — the apiaries also serving some of the settlers as dwellings, which one of her hosts took as a pretext for renaming Hondareda “El Nuevo Colmenar,” which translated approximately as “New Beehive” (a reversal of a name very common on the Iberian highland, “El Viejo Colmenar,” “Old Beehive”). And from this evening-warm incessant buzzing a single voice emerged, that of a child, not crying but shouting, rising unmistakably above all the underlying sounds: “Warte auf mich! Wait for me! Attends-moi! Es-pérame!” Now at nightfall the mighty rushing sound of the bees, and many bright, piercing tones.

Finally, when she was already an arrow-shot away from the ridge of the Sierra and the crossing point — off to one side of the Candeleda Pass — to the steep drop of the massif to the south, and the settlement behind her already out of cannon- and mortar-fire range, if not of rocket range, she could make out down below distant silhouettes, which, as they strolled alone along the only remaining bright feature of the landscape, the lake, the sky-mirroring laguna, were constantly ducking for no apparent reason, and in the trackless mountain steppe, before they crossed from one granite mound to another, whipped their dim profiles around, as if they were about to cross a dangerous boulevard with vehicles whizzing by.

And in the end she could no longer see any clear image of Hondareda or Hondoneda (the most recent maps mention the place only in parentheses, if at all), and instead, to the accompaniment of her steps crunching in the stones and scree, with stretches of quartz sand and snow in between, a litany consisting only of place names came to her: Nuevo Colmenar, Deep Enclosure, Dark Clearing, El Barco de la Sierra, Fondamente Nuove, New Briar Hole, Wandering Dune, High Lowland — just as the mountains of the summit plain, now at eye level, became transformed into pure names, and more and more were added to Galana (The Elegant One), Hermanitos (Little Brothers), Mira (= Look!), Morezón (from Moro: Moor, Arab?), Almanzor. Liturgy of preservation! It had been a long time since she had attended mass. “Attended”? Yes, attended. Yet there was hardly anything that completed one more than being present for the holy liturgy. Liturgy: oh, my goodness.