Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

So had she left no farewell present for the transitory people of Hondareda, whom she had once spoken of as “mine”? Nothing — nothing at all. She had even taken something away from them — pilfered something (see “fruit thief”). While she was making the rounds in the plantation there as a guest, and told one of her hosts about her early days as a fruit thief back in the village, he replied that for him, too, now soon to be an old man, climbing into a tree still meant a good beginning to a day or a happy day. She, “friend of thieves and lost souls”? A thief and lost soul herself?

In the course of time each of the immigrants in Hondareda had shared his story with her. The main point, for each, was his reasons for being here, but then came a whole slew of events that had nothing to do with that. The more the individual got into the swing of his narrative, the more the elements of the story became jumbled, which did not mean that his story was confused. It seemed rather to have taken place so long ago that now it was true again. What became clear, even without reasons: the way he or she had left a familiar region, homeland, state, confederation, etc., and that he or she would remain here now — where else? — though not necessarily forever.

Some of them invented their reasons, for the most part obviously flimsy ones—“I was running away from today’s women!”—“I wanted to escape the male world!”—“I did not want to die a rich man!”—so as to hint that in reality they had had entirely different reasons, or none at all, or that the reasons were not all that important to their story.

What gave an impetus to the speaking as well as the listening each time was first the sharing of a meal between the two of them (even days and months afterward, when she was already somewhere else entirely, she had an aftertaste, all the more fresh, of those Hondareda meals in her mouth), and then also the fact that the new settlers’ individual dwellings, despite their markedly private nature, all had the feel of a public or generally accessible space — not in the sense of gathering places, public offices, community halls, or churches, but of alehouses or dives, albeit without the ill repute; divelike simply because the dining table was always set up in the innermost recesses of the inhabited cave, and could have accommodated, in addition to the two of them and perhaps a child doing homework at the other end, various total strangers, who also seemed to be expected. To sit deep inside these caves with the aura of dives sharpened one’s attention and helped one collect oneself (was this expression still current?).

Thus one day, or one evening, she heard from a settler to whose table — at other times a workbench and various other things — she was invited, that he had left the land of his origin “out of sheer boredom. It was not my country in particular that bored me. Nor was it the climate. Or my work. It was sheer boredom, total and all-encompassing.

“True, even as a child and then, in a different way, as a youth, I was sometimes bored. But only sometimes, in certain places, in conjunction with certain activities, and primarily when I had no one or nothing to play with, and in my adolescence when I was terribly alone. Except that this kind of boredom became increasingly tolerable as I got older, for I imagined that later on, in my profession, I would no longer be alone, and that in love, or what I imagined love would be like, everything would be different.

“And what I imagined did not deceive me. From a time that cannot be pinpointed, once love arrived? once hate arose? once I found pleasure in action and inaction, also in taking care of things, in acting and thinking in concert with others, also in mere watching, I was no longer bored. At last I felt alive, one way or the other, even in sorrow and rage, and always, and in the thick of things — never lacking for excitement.

“And I imagined that from this moment on I would continue to be like those I had once envied, those who seemed to be basking in a realm inaccessible to me, who said of themselves: Bored? I have no idea what that means!

“My imagination turned out to have tricked me after all. In another period — known as the transition, right? — which cannot be pinpointed or dated, boredom returned, neither from one moment to the next nor from one day or year to the next. It did not come over me all of a sudden, but sneaked up on me — certain clichés, only a few, can hit the nail on the head, if not used too often — interposing itself between me and events, persons, things, places.

“First, I do not know when, one thing bored me, then several things, then everything. And even then I did not know that it was boredom — initially I felt only slight discomfort, which in the end became huge. For, truth be told, this was not a recurrence of the boredom familiar to me from my childhood and youth, an appropriate, healthy, or at least not unhealthy boredom, but rather a sickness, something without a name, and calling it ‘boredom’ or ‘nameless’ was merely an expression of my confusion and helplessness. Sickness and madness. It became a boredom as hopeless as it was deadly: on the one hand, I was hopelessly sick with it, and on the other hand, I was driven in my insane boredom to exterminate and destroy. ‘You bore me’ meant the same thing as: ‘ My child bores me,’ as: ‘ My house bores me,’ as: ‘ The forest bores me,’ and also, yes, ‘ I bore myself ’—and it meant a compulsion to do away with you, my child, the forest, and myself.

“And so I had to get out, to come here. And at least here I am rid of that kind of boredom. And by now I even imagine that I am on my way to a third kind of boredom here, one in which, just as before, time will seem to stretch, but in an entirely different way. This morning I walked across a snowfield and kept sinking in with my left leg, never with my right. In front of me in the snow, I swear to God, a snake was crawling along, and then a giant dragonfly with a yellow head was swooping over the ice floes in the lake.”

Another person whose hospitality she enjoyed for a while said that he had originally come to the region to do glacier research — his specialty: the hollows left by the melted glacial masses, together with their microclimate, vegetation, and so forth — and then he had decided on the spur of the moment to stay here, to continue his research and simply to stay.

The next person who took her in presented himself to her as someone who, in his place of origin, had been obsessed with searching — searching for treasures, as well as for this little thing or that — with searching in general, and in Hondareda, where there was nothing to search for, and all the treasures, if there had been any to discover there, had already been extracted, he finally felt free of his compulsion, especially of his narrow, and narrowing, searcher’s gaze, and free, for what? For now, simply free.

Others among the founders told her their stories: of being descended from a tribe of missionaries, involved for centuries in converting everything they came across, anywhere in the world, and of having put this tribe and its missionary zeal behind them once they set out for or returned here; or: having become, in their distant country of origin, in the course of life as petty-minded as their neighbors, in fact several degrees more crotchety, more narrow-minded, more malicious — more mean and nasty, lying in wait for some misfortune to strike next door, an accident, a separation, a death — one simply had to escape from an environment that turned one into a person like that!; or they told of inheriting from their ancestors, handed down from generation to generation, over there in Peru, Arizona, Ecuador, Honduras (!), the sense that the mere mention of the Sierra de Gredos and of Hondareda was the magic word at the right moment, “like a lit match”; or having been inspired to come here simply by the names, or by the sound of one name or another along the way, the sound of “El Almanzor,” “El Puerto de Candeleda,” “río Tormes,” “río Bar-bellido,” “La Galana,” “La Angostura,” “Ramacastañas.”