Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

One of them explained to her, and he was perfectly serious, that he had come to Hondareda from Tokyo, or was it Honolulu? or Cairo? and then settled there because he wanted to feel that he was “finally in a hub” again, in a place and a region “where something mattered,” “where something could be seen happening”—what could be seen? — no answer — but then she had not asked, either.

And then another in his dinner-table monologue (she always had the impression that the entire colony of settlers was sitting at the table with the two of them): here in the trough in the high Sierra he had begun to dream again; the closed-off or remote nature of the region produced (yes) particularly cosmopolitan dreams, also — expansive dreams, in which he himself participated only as part of an audience—“but how I participate! More involved than I ever was in my time as a protagonist!”—epic dreams, whose vividness stayed with him when he woke up, and represented “capital” for the day, for being and acting awake, value (it took no special talent to guess that the speaker here was her former co-director at the world or central bank, or whatever it was called or may have been called — who seemed, by the way, to have forgotten his partner, or at least acted as though he had).

And for a while she had been the guest of a former judge — as for her other hosts, she unobtrusively took over the household chores, or served as a sort of barmaid — who among other things at one point wound up to offer more or less the following account: “In the thousands of years of recorded human history, we have already had one age of judges. It is supposed to have been a heroic era, a pioneering time, a time of preparation, the time before the age of kings and then of emperors. The people’s judges were also the rulers or leaders, the generals, the administrators, and the high priests. But their chief title was that of judge.” As fate or chance would have it, at this moment the ex-judge’s grandnephew or foster son stuck his head into the cave, which, as everywhere in H., grew increasingly grand the deeper one advanced into it, and asked, “Did you call me?” Her host said no, and continued: “And in my time out there and down below, it was an age of judges again, a different one, and with different judges. I myself come from a family of judges. All the men and then all the women in this family practiced the judge’s profession, without much effort, simply following a tradition that had the force of law. But I wanted to have been the last in our family line! With me and through me we were to become extinct as judges. And so I have broken out of the family tradition, at least for the time being, and am no longer in office. Never again to judge, to hand down verdicts, to convict. Never again to base my entire existence on being a judge, and at the same time to destroy another’s existence, or at least put it in jeopardy. For this second age of judges, as it was still in force down/out there until just a while ago, yes, or is still in force, was, as I know, for I was part of it, no return to that pioneering era but rather an age of terror, a new one and a new kind.

“The second age of judges was, or is, one of unlimited, arbitrary, and uncontrolled despotism, masquerading as an obligation to intervene in anything and everything — and a despotism no longer confined to individuals but all-inclusive. For anyone can claim to belong to the family of judges, and every man and every woman can cast, and casts, him- or herself with unequaled self-aggrandizement as the judge of everything and everyone, as the judge of the whole world. And these judges of the world want to be something that fortunately no one else wants to be anymore, or perhaps not? They want to be world rulers in their own way. And a result of that was, and is, that now none of the innumerable judges will himself tolerate being judged by the world.”

Again the boy poked his head in the door, but this time he said, “I knocked over the milk can”—whereupon his foster father replied, as if in jest, “An hour of detention in the cellar, without light, and for a month a hard cot and lights on, you useless good-for-nothing!” and continued, “Anything but to be a judge again! In my time , that means the time now, after my time as a judge!” (And was not he the one who had proclaimed that stealing an apple from a stranger’s tree should be viewed as daybreak in the middle of the day?)

For a while the abdicated queen of finance was also hosted by the likewise abdicated “king” and “emperador.” He was one of those in Hondareda who lived entirely alone, without grandchildren or other descendants. And it was not only because during her time as his guest she did the household chores for him in his “royal palace” or Palacio Real that the old man viewed her as if she had been the one who took him in when he was abandoned in the high steppe.

His palace was located in a cul-de-sac, part of the rocky chaos like the majority of the other buildings, though even more huddled, more crooked, and more like a hideout, and like the others who had found their way there, this Charles the Fifth or the First exuded the quiet sadness of a widower, and occasionally the delicate loneliness of an orphan.

Another factor in his case was that he was gravely ill and knew that he would die today or tomorrow, and up here in the high Sierra, not in the monastery of Yuste in the southern Piedmont, like the historical Charles. He had dragged himself, alone in the end, without his litter and bearers, up here and down into the pit of Hondareda, to end his days in this place, and that would occur in a manner entirely different from down near the plain — just the way he imagined his death, if it had to be now; wished it; wanted it.

Besides, he had had enough of kingship and emperorship, his own and in general. Over and done with, once and for all. What was it they said about kings? During their entire lives they had to be there for others and do nothing but listen from morn till night. And what had poor Louis the Sixteenth, on the evening before his beheading, impressed upon his son? A stern, bitter dictum: “Beware of being king!”

And yet this Carlos remained of two minds up to the hour of his death, or he was, as another of those apocryphal authors chimed in, “downright schizophrenic”: his abdication and also the general disappearance or disempowerment of kings struck him as perfectly fine — and a second age of kings, like the “second age of judges,” heaven forbid! — and, conversely, as he looked back on the life in society that he, split personality or not, imaginary king or not, had left behind when he set out for the Sierra de Gredos, his own renunciation seemed a bit hasty, to say the least, as he saw before him, like a waking nightmare, the individual members of that society, in which meanwhile almost everyone had become his own king and self-appointed emperor, with ears for no one and nothing else, day in, day out, and if at one moment he was the soul of serenity and even wanted to lay his hands on his contemporaries, who had become so foreign to him, to perform the miracle of healing, in the next moment he wanted to curse them royally, as in bygone times. Wasn’t he striving, after all, to regain his kingship? Yes, but more in the sense of a counter-king. He wanted to serve as a counter-king and a counter-emperor for his contemporaries.

Not until the day of his death was he in fact completely reconciled to what he had renounced. His being or playing at being king no longer mattered. The dream was over, and with it the split personality. He was simply the person he had been during his time there in Hondareda: the archivist, not in Simancas or some such place in the historical world, but for the new settlement — his cooking/living/sleeping hovel, with stacks, drawers, cupboards full of documentation, documentary stones, documentary plants, a concentrated memorial to everything that Hondareda would have been.